Evolutionary Ecology

Mechanism, development and function of individual differences in social groups.

In my NERC Independent Research Fellowship I will generate a body of evidence-based theory about individual variation in group-living animals. Group-living animals are extremely important to the functioning of the world’s ecosystems, but a crucial aspect of groups – that individuals are very variable in behaviour and appearance – has not been thoroughly studied. More details at my NERC page.

One aspect of this work has involved considering the effect of variation on inclusive fitness, leading to a generalisation of Hamilton's rule. Read about it here.

My PhD student, Laure Olivier is interested in how variation affects the conflict and cooperation among cooperative breeders. Co-supervised with Andy Radford.

Behavioural pollination ecology

I am working on a synthesis of behavioural ecology and pollination ecology. The role of learning and mechanical constraints in the foraging behaviour of pollinators will greatly impacts on their elationships with other species in ecological communities. For example, I have studied how honeybees maximise the amount of nectar they collect whilst avoiding becoming food to flower-dwelling predators such as crab spiders and how this is likely to affect the evolution of flowering plants.

Antipredator adaptations

I am interested in how evolution has shaped the strategies that animals use to find food and avoid becoming food to predators. I am working to provide a predictive theoretical framework of investment in defences against predators in animals and plants. We are focussing on chemical and morphological defences, which are particularly common in insects, especially in the juvenile or larval stage (e.g. caterpillars). Our approach takes account of the fact that defences are unlikely to be cost-free, since animals must direct some of their energies in to creating and maintaining toxins and spines. In the larval stage of insects, when they are growing very quickly, this represents a substantial investment which might delay their reaching adulthood. As a result, we expect that animals should invest as little as possible in defence that allows them a fair chance of survival, and how much this should be will depend on many factors, such as food availability and the number of predators. I will test our predictions on the caterpillar of the large white butterfly, an important crop pest. This research interest includes a sideline in studying the effects that mimics (such as hoverflies) have on the predation and survival of their models (e.g. bees).