We are the research group of Dr Mike Webster based in the Centre for Biological Diversity in the School of Biology at the University of St Andrews. Our research focuses on behavioural and evolutionary ecology.

We are interested in the costs and benefits, functions and underlying mechanisms, and evolution of living in groups.

Current projects investigate: social learning and the spread of socially transmitted information through groups; the formation and maintenance of mobile animal groups; predator-prey interactions and the question of cooperative predator inspection; resource competition among foragers and scavengers.

We are also interested in how sampling biases and experimental artefacts affect findings in animal behaviour research.

Are the pools of subjects that we test always representative of the wider populations of animals that we seek to understand? And how do the decisions that we make when we design our experiments affect the behaviours that we are trying to measure? 

These questions have important implications for understanding why research findings sometimes do not replicate and for drawing more meaningful comparisons between similar studies.