Marion Nicolaus

Dr. Marion Nicolaus is a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Biology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich). Her research focuses on the fitness consequences of personality and behavioral plasticity in wild passerine populations, specifically great tits. She investigates how individual differences in risk-taking behaviors relate to adaptive variation tied to individual 'state,' explores correlations between personality and behavioral plasticity under natural selection, and examines how environmental changes influence behavioral adjustments using long-term population data. Pedigree analyses are employed to quantify genetic and environmental contributions to behavioral variation. Additionally, she examines whether personality-driven differences in behavioral plasticity stem from reliance on personal versus social information.