Our study systems include:

Social insects. We use social insects as our main study organisms. As one of the pinnacles of sociality, social insects are excellent models for understanding social evolution and host-symbiont relationships. Their societies range from simple to complex, and, unlike multicellular organisms, can be broken apart and put back together with relative ease, allowing us to investigate the importance of the constituent parts. They are faced with many of the same problems of disease as our own societies, but appear to be much more successful than us at dealing with them. Social insects are also of tremendous ecological and economic importance, including both pests and beneficial species. Our main study species are leaf-cutting ants, honeybees and bumblebees, but we've also worked with red ants, pharaoh’s ants, slave-maker ants and their slaves, weaver ants, army ants, and ‘primitively eusocial’ ponerine ants, depending on the research question.

Symbionts. Much of our research has utilised fungal parasites of insects (Metarhizium, Ascosphaera, Aspergillus), as well as the Nosema microsporidian parasites and viruses of bees. These parasites make excellent model species because they are experimentally tractable, allowing us to give controlled doses of the parasite to individual insects, to give them single or mixed infections of parasites to study within-host competition, and to then measure the fitness of the parasites and host very easily. We also work with Wolbachia and other cryptic bacterial symbionts, using qPCR, and metagenomic sequencing.

Sharks. As well as being charismatic animals of conservation concern, sharks can be excellent model species for investigating animal behaviour. We've worked with collaborators in South Africa to investigate individual differences in behaviour in white sharks using field samples and observations, and in catsharks with lab experiments.