Edmund Brodie
University of Virginia, VA·Ecology & Evolution
Animals change their behavior as they age. A population made mostly of older individuals is therefore a very different social world from one made mostly of young ones.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
- Topics
behavioral evolution
age structure
forked fungus beetle
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2030
What they work on
- Test whether age-dependent behavior in forked fungus beetles comes from an individual's own development or from flexible responses to partners of different ages, using paired interactions between beetles of different ages.
- Measure how beetles change their behavior when living in groups with experimentally altered age structures, and how these effects scale up from individuals to social networks and population-wide interaction patterns.
- Compare operational sex ratio, density and age structure in a multi-year selection experiment to find which most strongly drives selection on social behavior and social network traits.
- Develop AI-assisted video tracking and body measurement tools to capture fine-scale movement and social interactions across large numbers of beetles.
More about the research
This project asks whether the age mix of a group, called its age structure, shapes how individuals behave, which traits help them survive and reproduce, and so how natural and sexual selection act. The work is described as the first test of age structure as a demographic driver of behavioral evolution.
Why it matters
The work could change how biologists think about the forces that shape social behavior by showing whether the age mix of a population is a key factor in evolution. It also delivers AI-based video tools for measuring animal movement and interactions at large scale, which could help other behavioral researchers, and it supports K–12 evolution education.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Raisa Hernandez Pacheco
California State University-Long Beach, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Characterize physical and cognitive traits across the lifespan in rhesus macaques at Cayo Santiago and test whether these traits vary with individuals' social status.
Volker Rudolf
Rice University, TX·Ecology & Evolution
Measure natural variation in cannibalistic behavior within and among wild populations of the flour beetle Tribolium confusum, to establish how much this extreme selfish behavior differs in nature.
Vladimir Pravosudov
University of Nevada-Reno, NV·Ecology & Evolution
Identify the genetic basis of specialized spatial memory in food-caching mountain chickadees by combining whole-genome sequence and sequence capture data with spatial cognition measurements.
The school
University of Virginia: 43 labs on PI Pages, $814M a year on research, 413 research doctorates a year.
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