Postdoctoral researcher
Dr. Natalia Borrego has been a research associate with the Lion Center for over a decade. Currently, she is also a postdoctoral researcher with the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in the Department for the Ecology of Animal Societies and a project leader in the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz.
Natalia’s work investigates the proximate and ultimate mechanisms underlying mammalian behavior, with a focus on African lions. She aims to understand how flexible social strategies and variation, from the individual up to the metapopulation level, drive animals' interactions with each other and their environment. She takes an innovative approach to tackle her research questions; she combines advanced remote sensing technology (e.g., passive acoustic grids, camera traps, high-resolution GPS-collars) with classic field-observation methods (e.g., re-sightings, traditional spoor tracking, GPS-cluster follow-ups). From central Botswana's and Namibia’s desert-like landscapes to Zimbabwe's resource-rich habitats, she is working alongside an international team of collaborators to delve into lions’ behavioral ecology at an unprecedented level of detail. Excitingly, they have deployed cutting-edge collars that collect multi-modal data, including accelerometry, magnetometry, high-resolution GPS, and audio data on every individual in a pride/coalition and across study sites.
By bringing these new, remote-tracking tools to bear on long-standing questions in evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology, her research addresses everything from the second-to-second decisions that drive collective behavior to the landscape-scale patterns of splitting and merging that determine sub-group composition and the availability of group members. One especially intriguing line of her research focuses on lions’ cooperative hunting behavior under different ecological contexts. Her research in Botswana shows that lions residing in the resource scarce Central Kalahari region of Botswana prefer solitary hunting rather than cooperation. Notably, lions in this population regularly take down large, risky prey, i.e. giraffe and gemsbok, by themselves. Her findings challenge traditional views on the ubiquity of cooperation when hunting large, difficult prey and raise fundamental questions about the evolutionary drivers of cooperative hunting behavior. She is expanding this work by leveraging her ongoing multi-site and multi-modal data collection to investigate the complex dynamics that govern cooperative behaviors, e.g. partner availability, participation, and ecological factors such as prey density.
Simultaneously tracking the movement, behavior, and communication of entire lion prides across different ecological contexts will provide unprecedented insights into the drivers and variations of lion social dynamics. This research is particularly important for understanding the ecological adaptability of lions in the face of climate change.
In addition to her work with wild populations, Natalia also works with zoological facilities to study hypothesized links between social complexity and cognitive complexity. To do this, she uses behavioral enrichment techniques that both benefit the animals and serve as carnivore ‘IQ tests’ to experimentally investigate the cognitive capabilities of and differences among African carnivores. Her research on African lion cognition serves as the first formal investigations of cognition in this species. The ultimate goal of this research is to bridge the gaps between ethology and conservation by applying the mechanistic insights gained from her cognition studies to issues in wildlife conservation and management.
Finally, Natalia is committed to community engagement and capacity building in the countries where she works. She aims for her research projects to not only advance our knowledge of lions but also to support local communities and preserve traditional knowledge. One example is her work alongside San Trackers in collaboration with LEC.
