I use transcriptomics and neurophysiology to understand social behavior.
Specifically, I investigate how the reward system in social and sub-social bees may function and be selected to reinforce social behaviors. We aim to utilize contemporary techniques to study a variety of social behavior?
01.
Neurophysiology of Fanning Behavior
To effectively perform a group behavior, they must balance social and ecological information to decide how to behave. We utilize pharmacological and genetic techniques to explore how brains change with different information, and how we can test hypotheses about the balance during thermoregulatory behavior in honey bees.
02.
Epigenetics of Learning and Foraging Behavior
Individual bees learn in different ways, which leads to differences in foraging behavior. I created a nested design where I created colonies of known genetic background based on their learning behaviors, induced them to scout and recruit, then tested their learning behaviors in the lab.
At each step, I use RNAseq to understand how gene expression in the brains of these bees shifts to drive foraging and learning behavior. RNAseq is a powerful behavioral genetics tool that I will use to further explore how social interactions influence social behavior.
03.
Neurophysiology of Division of Labor in Sub-Social Bees
Bees are an ideal comparative taxonomic group to study collective cognition, as they can be solitary, obligately social, facultatively social, and eusocial, thus solving various cognitive tasks with evolutionarily similar genetics, physiology, and neuroanatomy. In a small sub-social carpenter bee, Ceratina calcarata, dopamine and serotonin shift across the lifetime of a female as she moves from a solitary to a social phase. Beyond that, little is known about what social or environmental cues they may learn that may influence behavior. To understand how social behavior evolves, I will compare social bees with subsocial and solitary bees to understand how learning may drive social behavior in different social contexts.
My long-term research goals are to understand how learning and reward systems can shape the evolution of complex social behavior and organization.
What we are learning
01.
Octopamine and tyramine drop in fanning honey bee brains. We pharmacologically manipulated fanning honey bees by feeding them octopamine and tyramine, and saw a reduction in the fanning response.
02.
Scouts foragers have a higher amount of tyramine in their brains compared to recruited bees. Recruited bees have a reduced amount of octopamine in their brains after associative learning compared to scout bees and bees that did not learn.
03.
In collaboration with Sarah Lawson and Sandra Rehan, we discovered that dopamine and serotonin shift when female small carpenter bees (Ceratina calcarata) found their nest and begin to interact with their offspring. Image by Sandra Rehan.