Claire-Eve Davidian

As a behavioral ecologist, I am interested in the causes and consequences for survival and reproduction of strategies adopted at the individual level for the acquisition of resources, sexual partners and social alliances in social animals. I am fascinated by how individual decisions and life-history traits generate complex processes at the level of social groups and populations, such as collective dispersal and social conventions, and how they shape power dynamics between males and females. I mainly use empirical data on the spotted hyena from the Ngorongoro Crater Hyena Project in Tanzania, a project launched in 1996 and which I have been co-directing with Oliver Höner (Leibniz-IZW, Berlin) since 2020.
But what's a spotted hyena specialist doing in the Anthropologie Evolutive team? My work on hyenas forces me to keep an open mind as to how I approach my scientific questions, and I take great pleasure in decompartmentalizing disciplines and making links across concepts and study models. Besides, hyenas and primates (human or otherwise) are surprisingly similar in many ways...
My current work focuses on: (i) the impact of demographic and kinship dynamics on social conventions, (ii) the eco-evolutionary determinants of dominance styles and (iii) the feedback between social inequalities and reproductive inequalities in mammals. I'm also very involved in various popular science projects.