Events Detail

Speaker:
Yuko Ulrich, University of Lausanne

This event is part of an event series „Animal Sociality Seminar“.

Yuko Ulrich is Junior Group Leader at University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She is interested in the interplay between social organization and disease resistance in animal societies. The goal of her lab is to experimentally investigate the link between the composition of a social group, the structure of its interaction network, and its susceptibility to disease.

"Division of labor and disease in clonal ant colonies"

The impact of infectious diseases are exacerbated in social organisms, which live in dense groups where pathogens can rapidly transmit between hosts. Theory predicts that disease dynamics will depend in large part on a group's composition and social interaction network, but empirical data are scarce. Our goal is to experimentally investigate the link between the composition of a social group, the structure of its interaction network, and its susceptibility to disease. To do this, we use a novel system, the clonal raider ant Ooceraea biroi, whose unusual biology allows us to precisely control and replicate colony composition. We use automated behavioral tracking to study how experimental colonies of different composition regulate behavior at the individual and group levels, and how this in turn might affect disease resistance.