STUDY SYSTEMS
Polistes paper wasps
The queens of social insects are of central importance to the initiation, growth, genetic makeup, regulation, and success of their colony. In fact, it is often useful to view a queen's workers as an extended phenotype of the queen, and the queens and workers together viewed as a type of "superorganism." Because queens are so influential, it seems obvious that paying attention to a queen's physical and behavioral traits may give us insight into the mechanisms driving inter-colony differences in collective behavior and success. I do this by assessing the physical and behavioral traits of paper wasp queens (Polistes metricus, P. dominula, and P. fuscatus) before they initiate colonies, and observe how these traits predict their future colony's behavior and success in the wild.
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Please click on the CV or AUDIOPAPER link above to view or listen to my published work on this system. I am always looking for new people to collaborate with, and new field assistants each spring! If you're interested in being either of those things, please don't hesitate to email me!
Stegodyphus social spiders
In order to understand why a colony behaves a certain way, often you must examine the the behavioral tendencies of the individuals that comprise them. Stegodyphus social spiders are an excellent system to study the ways in which individual differences in behavior influence the way colonies react to their environment. This is because they live in social groups that are genetically similar, the same age, and lack specialized morphological variation. Because of this, colonies must partition tasks and divide labor according to innate behavioral differences.
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My research focuses specifically on how the behavioral distribution of individuals influences colony-level behavioral plasticity in response to predators and, inversely, how fear of predators feeds back to influence the collective behavior of groups. Furthermore, I am interested in how groups deal with environmental information about predation risk, and the subsequent behavioral rules colonies follow in order to mitigate threat.
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