The structure of complex animal societies

The question of why some species like to form groups and live with one another while others do not has fascinated scientists for decades if not centuries.

Many mechanisms have also been proposed to explain variation in sociality, and my project will study social variation among the shell-dwelling Lamprologine cichlid fishes of Lake Tanganyika in East Africa. The shell-dwelling cichlids are an interesting study system because they differ dramatically in social traits (e.g., group size, group spacing, social behavioural repertoire, and interaction frequency), while still sharing many ecological and morphological characteristics (e.g., same habitat, same resource use, similar body sizes, similar diets, same predation threats, etc.). 

My work takes me to Lake Tanganyika, Zambia, to test various theories about what factors give rise to the social diversity seen in this species group, and to ask what co-evolutionary consequences their social divergence has had. I combine measurements of social behaviour in the wild with population genetics, relatedness analyses, and resource mapping to test whether ecological constraints (e.g., the local abundance and distribution of resources) or population kinship structure (i.e., relatedness between neighbours) explains patterns in social structure.

I also test whether differences in social structure within and across species are associated with different neuroanatomical and physiological traits. 

Overall, this helps us better understand the causes and consequences of the evolution of complex social life.