Evolutionary Biology, with broad interests in social evolution, co-evolution, animal behaviour and behavioural ecology.
Research Area
Research in my group focuses on the relationship between social behaviour and evolution. With experiments in the field and the laboratory, we investigate the evolution of social behaviour and consider how social behaviour can, in turn, affect evolution.
The social behaviour of interest throughout is parental care. Whereas our earlier work focused mainly on birds, more recently we have switched to working mainly on burying beetles, Nicrophorus spp. Nicrophorus beetles are common in woodlands surrounding Cambridge and also breed readily in the lab. With fieldwork, we investigate the extent to which neighbouring populations are locally and adaptively divergent. In the lab, we attempt to re-run the course of adaptive evolution using experimental evolution. The goal is to understand how social behaviour contributes to evolution by acting as a ‘hidden’ agent of natural selection, by changing the pace at which traits change in response to selection, by influencing genetic variation and by providing diverse mechanisms for the non-genetic inheritance of key fitness-related traits. Through various collaborations, we use diverse techniques in our research including genomics, theoretical modelling and biomechanics.
Project Interests
I am interested in understanding how social behaviour might contribute to the reproductive isolation of different populations directly (through the interactions of social partners) and indirectly (through its effect on genetic variation and genomic organisation). I would be happy to develop projects that involve ecological research on burying beetles, including population sampling across a broad geographical range. I would be interested to think about projects that focus on techniologies for recording beetle behaviour, in the lab and in the field.
