Event

Abstract: Cooperation has repeatedly arisen as an adaptive strategy for exploiting diverse environments. Consequently, social animals represent some of the most ubiquitous and ecologically dominant animal lineages globally. Understanding how these societies arise and function—and how they might fare under climate change—therefore addresses fundamental questions in evolutionary ecology and has implications for conservation, agriculture, and food security. My research explores the ecological drivers and consequences of social evolution in flexibly social insects, primarily bees. Facultatively social species provide tractable model systems for comparing the fitness effects of social and solitary strategies in sympatry, while controlling for phylogeny. Integrating techniques in behavioral ecology, physiology, and computational biology, this body of work has provided evidence for the adaptive value of social strategies under challenging climatic conditions, across various life history stages, and in response to ecological and physiological constraints. In particular, sociality may confer resilience to climate change by generating novel strategies for coping with climate extremes. A key theme in my work is leveraging image data to explore functional traits across the spectrum of bee sociality. Taking advantage of recent advances in machine learning and computer vision, this work aims to develop and apply novel computational tools for high-throughput image analysis to accelerate ecological and conservation research on bees. Together, these findings advance our understanding of the evolutionary origins of sociality and the fate of social organisms in a changing world.

Twitter/X: @MaddieOstwald

Website: https://madeleineostwald.weebly.com