Research Interests

Social organisms live in a fine balance between cooperation and conflict. Understanding the evolution of conflict and how it affects sociality is a major current topic in evolutionary theory. My research started on this question using a group famous for their social behaviour, the social insects, specifically Polistes wasps. Polsites wasps have small 'primitive' societies making them an excellent model system for understanding the origins of social behaviour. The focus of my research was to investigate the effect of relatedness on behaviour within the nest. Theory predicts that low related nest members will be lazy and fight for more reproduction while highly related nest members will be more cooperative i.e. that relatedness will strongly effect the resolution of conflict. Although, behaviour seemed unaffected by relatedness, my coworkers and I discovered colonies in which members were completely unrelated. This challenged the dogma of theory that all social insect colonies are held together by common genetic interest.

The next stage of my research is to apply the theories developed for the social insects to a very different species, the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. D. discoideum is a unicellular organisms which, when starving, aggregates to form a differentiated multicellular organism (slug). Importantly, cells of different genetic origin (different clones) will readily aggregate together to form chimaeric organisms. Furthermore, not all cells in the organism are reproductive, some die in forming a stalk that holds the reproductive spores aloft. This leads to the prediction of conflict between clones as they fight to become reproductive. I intend to study the mechanistic basis for this conflict, that is what governs the choice of one clone to go to the stalk versus the spores?