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Info DEE # 28 - June 2021
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WELCOME TO OUR NEW COLLEAGUES
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Mr Loic Brun is back at the DEE as PhD student in the group of Prof. van de Waal. Loïc is located in office 2107.1, phone 42.75. Loic.Brun@unil.ch
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Mr Fergus Wright joined the group of Prof. Sanders as PhD student. Fergus is located in office 4314, phone 42.72. Fergus.Wright@unil.ch
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After successfully passed his thesis, Christian de Guttry will continue a collaboration with the group of Prof. Wedekind as SNF Senior researcher. Congratulations to Christian and welcome back. He will still located in office 2107, phone 42.23. Christian.deGuttry@unil.ch
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Ms Laura Najera Cortazar has joined the group of Prof. Christe as a Post Doctoral Fellow. Laura is located in office 3214.1, phone 42.17. Laura.NajeraCortazar@unil.ch
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Mr Alan Castiço has joined the DEE as an Animal Keeper. Alan is located in office 1114, phone 41.63. Alan.Castico@unil.ch
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Ms Sagane Dind has joined the group of Prof. Waterhouse as Bioinformatician. Sagane is located in office 3212.1, phone 41.18. Sagane.Dind@unil.ch
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Mr Laurent Kremmer has joined the group of Prof. Kawecki as a Lab Technician. Laurent is located in office 2107.2, phone 42.55. Laurent.Kremmer@unil.ch
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We are also glad to count on the help of new students-assistants: Ms Marie KOLSCH (Keller Group) and Ms Brenda RIOS OCHOA (Groupe Kawecki). Welcome to them too.
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Congratulations to Dany Buffat, (former Master student in the Keller group) who has received a prize from the Faculty for his excellent work in the Master of Science in Behaviour, Evolution and Conservation. This and other prizes were awarded during the Masters ceremony on June 11th.
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The anthill – a city teeming with diligent and disciplined workers? Cleo Bertelsmeier was interviewed by Migros Magazine where she looked further into this question and discovered a world that was more chaotic and fascinating than imagined. Read the article (French)
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Like every year, Les Mystères de l’UNIL opens doors and shares the pleasures of scientific research. In 2021, it's adapted to the current situation and comes directly to you, online, at school and at home, with interesting contributions from DEE members.
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The FBM Awards were presented on Monday, June 14th during a small ceremony at auditoire César Roux (CHUV). Congratulations to Cleo Bertelsmeier for receiving the Communication Award 2020 for her book Les guerres secrètes des fourmis. Congratulations are also an order for all the assistants involved in practical and exercise teaching for receiving the Special Award for Outstanding Dedication in Practical Teaching 2021.
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Congratulations to Marc Robinson-Rechavi who was elected as a member of the Faculty Council of Biology and medicine (2021-2023)
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In an extensive field research, Amaranta Fontcuberta, Ornela De Gasperin, Amaury Avril, Sagane Dind and Michel Chapuisat examined how young females and males of Alpine silver ants dispersed from their natal colonies, with whom they mated, and how they spread the supergene leading to alternative social organization. The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, sheds light on how supergenes can jointly control co-evolving traits, like dispersal and sociality.
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Former post-docs and master students of the Keller Group (Dr. Thomas O. Richardson, Andrea Coti, Dr. Nathalie Stroeymeyt,) published an article in Communications Biology. Economic theory predicts that organisations achieve higher levels of productivity when tasks are divided among different subsets of workers. This prediction is based upon the expectation that individuals should perform best when they specialise upon a few tasks. To address this issue, they performed a targeted worker removal experiment to disrupt the normal allocation of workers to a cooperative team task – tandem running. During a tandem run a knowledgeable leader communicates the location of a new nest to a follower by physically guiding her there. The targeted removal of prominent leaders significantly reduced tandem performance, whereas removal of prominent followers had no effect. Furthermore, analyses of the experience of both participants in each tandem run revealed that tandem performance was influenced primarily by how consistently the leader acted as a leader when the need arose, but not by the consistency of the follower. Their study shows that performance in ant teams depends largely on whether or not a key role is filled by an experienced individual, and suggests that in animal teams, not all roles are equally important.
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Prof. Laurent Keller published an article with colleagues from the University of Bath and the Zoological Society of London in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. In this study they used automated radio-tagging data from over 1000 wasps from 93 nests and social network analyses of over 30 000 nest visitation records to describe and explain interactions across levels of social organization in the eusocial paper wasp Polistes canadensis. They detected three levels of social organization (nest, aggregation and community) which exchange ‘drifter’ individuals within and between levels. The highest level (community) may be influenced by the patchiness of high-quality nesting habitats in which these insects exist. Networks of drifter movements were explained by the distance between nests, the group size of donor nests and the worker-tobrood ratios on donor and recipient nests. These findings provide some explanation for the multi-level social interactions, which may otherwise seem paradoxical. Fitness benefits across multiple levels of social organization should be considered when trying to understand animal societies.
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Marc Robinson-Rechavi is now affiliated at bioRxiv, screening preprints before they go live.
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