Events Detail

Speaker:
Mark Laidre

This event is part of an event series „Summer Seminar Series“.

View the recording of Mark's talk here

Mark Laidre will present at the CASCB regular Monday seminar on "Architectural foundations of collective behaviour in nature’s housing market."

Organisms architecturally modify environments and these modifications may persist across generations, potentially strongly shaping social behavior. This talk will review a decade of field and laboratory experiments, which have experimentally tested the impact of architectural modifications from earlier generations on social behavior in later generations. I focus on a seemingly trivial act of construction, the architectural 'home remodeling' of shells, which has sparked the creation of a new social order among terrestrial hermit crabs. I begin by providing an overview of the ultimate causes of home remodeling, including the natural selection pressures that both enabled and favored this modified architecture. I then explore the ultimate consequences of home remodeling, including the impacts that a changed housing market has on the following: collective social dynamics, coalition formation, signaling, cognition, penis size, and the potential for adaptive radiation. This work highlights the fundamental role that architecture can play in shaping behavior, including collective behavior. Finally, I highlight new work in progress on collective migration from land to sea.