You are cordially invited to the Seminar organized by the Psychology Department.
Title: The evolution and functional implications of socially synchronized rhythms in ants.
Presenter: Dr. Grant Navid Doeringi Postdoctoral research scholar, Arizona State University
Date & Time: April 11, 2025; Friday at 12:30 Place: A-130
Abstract: Collective behaviors are widespread in social animals, yet the factors driving the evolution of diverse collective phenotypes across species are not well understood. Due to their taxonomic diversity and small colony sizes, acorn ants (genera Temnothorax and Leptothorax) provide us with a valuable model clade for studying the evolution of emergent collective behaviors such as synchronization and collective decision-making. In this talk, I summarize my work on the socially synchronized rest/activity rhythms of acorn ants and outline my future research goals for studying the evolution of social behavior and cognition more broadly. In the first part of my presentation, I show how synchronized activity can improve spatial accessibility inside of nests by suppressing the formation of traffic jams in walking ants. I then present a comparative study involving 22 species and over 1,500 behavioral rhythm time series from hundreds of colonies and isolated individuals, totaling over 1.5 years of behavioral data. This study revealed that the rate of phenotypic evolution for colony-level phenotypes can exceed the rate of evolution of analogous traits measured at the level of individual ants. Finally, by assembling colonies with experimentally manipulated demographics, I show that asymmetry in the social interactions between queens and worker ants may play a crucial role in the evolution of the colony-level differences between species. Based on my results, I hypothesize that more rapid evolution of emergent phenotypes relative to lower-level phenotypes is a general feature of complex biological systems. To conclude my talk, I will discuss what I envision my lab at Bilkent University would look like and the research projects that I am most excited about pursuing next.
Bio: Grant Navid Doering received his undergraduate education at Arizona State University and earned his PhD from the department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour at McMaster University in Canada. His research lies at the interface of behavioral ecology, evolutionary biology, and animal cognition. Most of his work relies on ants and leverages mathematical modelling, computer vision techniques, and phylogenetic comparative methods to study both the mechanistic basis of collective animal behaviors as well as how such behaviors diversify among species during the course of evolution.