Nobuyuki KUTSUKAKE Associate Professor

E-mail:
Personal web site: https://sites.google.com/site/nkutsukakee/
Lab web site: https://sites.google.com/site/sokendarwineng/

Animal behaviour, Behavioral ecology, Primatology

The observation of animals leads us to a number of questions such as "How do animals live?", "Why do animals behave in a certain way?", " What do animals know and understand?", and "Why are there so many species?" A goal of my studies is to understand animal behavior and ecology from a standpoint of evolution. I have two ongoing projects. The first one is on social evolution in group-living mammals. I want to know how individuals should behave in order to maximize their (inclusive) fitness in a complex social environment. So far, I have been working on cooperation, conflict, conflict resolution, and communication in mammals and other vertebrates (birds and fish). The second one is on phenotypic evolution and comparative approaches with information of phylogeny. I am applying a new computational framework of phylogenetic comparative analyses to complex and heterogeneous data to infer processes of trait evolution.

nobuyuki_kutsukake

Papers and publications

  1. Mizuno K, Irie N, Hiraiwa-Hasegawa M, Kutsukake N. 2016. Asian elephants acquire inaccessible food by blowing. Animal Cognition.
  2. Takeda FK, Hiraiwa-Hasegawa M, Kutsukake N. 2015. Arch displays signal threat intentions in a fission-fusion flock of the red-crowned crane. Behaviour, 152: 1779-1799.
  3. Hasegawa M, Kutsukake N. 2015. Bayesian competitiveness estimation predicts dominance turnover among males in wild chimpanzees. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 69: 89-99
  4. Kutsukake N, Innan H. 2014. Detecting phenotypic selection by approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) in phylogenetic comparative methods. In: Modern Phylogenetic Comparative Methods and their Application in Evolutionary Biology - Concepts and Practice (ed. Garamszegi LZ), Springer, p 409-424.
  5. Kutsukake N, Innan H. 2013 Simulation-based likelihood approach for evolutionary models of phenotypic traits on phylogeny. Evolution 67: 355-367
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