Miriam Scriba

About Me

I am a behavioral biologist and PhD candidate at the University of Hamburg on an Evangelische Studienstiftung fellowship, currently in the final phase of my doctoral research. As a student of behavioural ecology, I am fascinated by the evolution of different sensory systems. My doctoral studies focus on the mating system of jumping spiders and the role that their sensory system plays in courtship and predator avoidance.

My expertise lies in behavioural experiments, statistical data analysis (R), and biological data interpretation.

I appreciate analysing complex questions, developing hypotheses, and critically evaluating them while identifying new connections. I am particularly passionate about the creative development of innovative solutions.

Research Interests

Courtship in Saitis barbipes

Taking risks

When to engage in risky behaviours is an important decision in an individual’s life, and an important research topic in behavioural ecology.
Jumping spiders are known for their elaborate courtship displays. Misdirected courtship of males towards predators and females of different species is often observed, but its consequences are not really known. I am interested in risk-aversion and misdirected courtship in Saitis barbipes. My current research project investigates differences between males, females and juveniles when confronted with another, larger jumping spider, with the aim of understanding how sex differences in risk aversion explain misdirected courtship.

(Publication in progress)

Courtship

Like many other jumping spider species, males of Saitis barbipes perform a complex multimodal courtship display involving dancing, colour display, and vibration.
I am interested in the dancing part of their signal and its function during courtship. One of my projects focuses on whether females pay attention to male displays and if the male's dancing movements serve as an indicator of his quality.

(Data analysis and publication in progress)

A male Saitis barbipes (right) courting a female.

Vision

How do organisms perceive their world? When I learned that the answer to this question strongly depends on the visual system of the organism, I became fascinated by animal visual systems and did my master’s on colour vision in birds. My master’s project used different visual models (artificial trichromats versus avian tetrachromats) to investigate the function of the long-wavelength receptor in birds in perceiving colour contrasts.

Building an ophthalmoscope

Knowing what an animal is able to see in focus can be useful for understanding its visual system. I started to construct a small and affordable ophthalmoscope. This apparatus enables me to look into the secondary eyes of jumping spiders (and potentially other animals) and indirectly measure at which distances they are able to see objects in focus. This project has been quite a challenge since I have no prior knowledge of optics. But as you can see in the second picture below, the opthalmoscope is able to visualise the retina of the anterior lateral eye of my jumping spiders. The little dots are single photoreceptors on the retina.

The first image shows the left anterior median eye and anterior lateral eye of a jumping spider. The second image shows the retina of the anterior lateral eye of a male through the ophthalmoscope.

More light ...

I am also working on some small side-projects in parallel to my main PhD project. Recently I became more interested in polarised light. Linear polarisation sensitivity is widespread in the animal kingdom. The detection of polarization can be valuable many as it provides additional information about the surface it reflects off. This capability has broad applications across various fields and technologies. I am currently learning more about polarised light and methods to investigate this interesting property.

Coding

I enjoy the challenge of learning programming languages. After working with R for statistical analysis, I developed an interest in Python for Raspberry Pi applications and enjoyed developing creative solutions for my experimental setups. More recently, I have explored HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and completed a course in MySQL for database management. I am excited to further expand my skill set by learning to work with PHP and continuing to apply my knowledge to small real-world application projects.