The evolution and impacts of socially transferred materials.
Research Area
Socially transferred materials like milk, eggs, and regurgitate that are transferred in the context of care can entrench metabolic division of labour and interdependency between partners. Behaviours evolved for social transfers of material are often complex and can involve highly adapted physiological features that produce, secrete, and transmit the socially transmitted materials. To build and secrete these transferred materials, lineages can evolve new organs, new secretion pathways and can evolve or co-opt genes to enable the transfer and impact receivers. Because social regurgitation is used to varying degrees over the ant phylogeny, we can exploit the incredible diversity of ants (>14000 species) to understand how it evolved. Working with ant colonies, which act like distributed multicellular organisms, allows us to explore the link between intercellular communication with interindividual communication.
The lab focuses on social transfers and socially transferred materials using tools from multiple fields. We use proteomics, metabolomics and transcriptomics to understand which materials are transferred between individuals. We use molecular biology and biochemistry tools to manipulate. We built a quantitative behaviour system to track individuals and fluorescence transfer between them. We use comparative phylogenetic methods and genomics to explore shifting traits and genetic change.
Project Interests
I love interdisciplinary work and welcome creative combinations of ideas and fields. Here are a handful of example topics I would be interested in working on:
- Using diversity indices to understand within-species and inter-individual variation in socially transferred materials using diverse datasets (e.g. milk proteomics, ant regurgitate).
- Adult manipulation of larval development in ants through socially transferred components.
- Ants as a model for inter-cellular regulation of tissue ageing through metabolic division of labour.
- How different lineages of honeypot ants evolved microbial food storage techniques convergently.
- Discovering the recipe for a bioactive social fluid.
- Using queuing theory to understand metabolic flows across ant colonies
- Harnessing ants for agriculture – with or without aphids