To get the most out of social interactions, animals need information about one another. For instance, information about kinship can allow animals to direct help towards relatives while avoiding costly inbreeding. My research largely focuses on how animals gather and use different kinds of information to make optimal (fitness-maximising) decisions in a social setting. At the same time, I am also interested in how selection has shaped social behaviours, in particular the role of direct and indirect fitness in the evolution of alloparental care across taxa.
Recognising kinWhat are the mechanisms that animals use to recognise kin? Previous research with Prof. Jane Hurst at the University of Liverpool showed that female house mice recognise close kin based on shared Major Urinary Proteins (MUPs). Ongoing work is also exploring the role of maternal factors in kin recognition and how kinship between mothers affects maternal investment within communal nests.
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Helping kinAmong cooperatively-breeding species, there is huge variation in the amount of care that non-reproductive helpers provide to the offspring of other group members. A recent comparative study of 36 bird species in collaboration with Profs. Ben Hatchwell and Rob Freckleton at the University of Sheffield found that helper investment in alloparental care increases with the relatedness of helpers to brood, reaffirming the central role of kin selection in the evolution of cooperation in birds.
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Assessing rivalsKnowing the strength of rivals allows animals to decide how hard to fight and when to give in. For my PhD at the University of Sussex, I studied contest behaviour in Polistes dominula paper wasps and showed that there is variation between populations in the use of black facial patterns as status signals. In addition, my research explored contest behaviour and reproductive competition between P. dominula and its social parasite P. semenowi (top, centre).
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