Social Insect Research Group
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Overview
Genetic Dispositions, Neurobiological and Physiological Foundations, Behavioral Mechanisms and Evolutionary Processes in Insect Societies
What the fruit fly is for classical genetics and the squid axon for neurobiology, the insect society is for sociobiology. Many of the sociobiological concepts and hypotheses proposed 35 years ago were confirmed, modified, revised or advanced by empirical studies with social insects during the past quarter century. The dominant role in terrestrical ecology and the astounding evolutionary success of social insects is based on remarkable systems of division of labor involving often hundreds and thousands of individual organisms. Such cooperative organizations can only work by means of integrating communication mechanisms.
Understanding the genetic, neurobiological, and physiological foundations of such social behavior, and analyzing the behavioral mechanisms of the communication systems by which cooperative interactions and division of labor among hundreds of thousands of individuals is regulated, is one of the goals of the Social Insect Study Group at the School of Life Sciences of the Arizona State University. We are also interested in understanding the evolutionary interplay of cooperation and conflict in insect societies, and in the analyses of foraging strategies, competition, territorial tactics, and collective decision making. Furthermore we investigate life cycle strategies and sociogenesis, molecular phylogenics and behavior-ecological mechanisms of speciation.
For our investigations we focus mainly on ants and honey bees, but occasionally also on other social insects, such as social wasps and termites. We consider the organism and the society in its natural habitat the main subjects of our inquiry, but, where needed, we employ “state of the arts” analytical techniques to analyze genetic, molecular, and cellular mechanism underlying organismal functions.
We share a strong conviction that excellent research has to be combined with excellent teaching. Students and postdoctoral fellows find a unique diversity of expertise, cutting-edge techniques, and theoretical modeling tools within our group. Our group is part of the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity, which fosters interdisciplinary co-operations between biologists, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, mathematicians, physicists, and chemists.