Ecology & Evolutionary Biology · Princeton University
What are the causes and consequences of cooperation?
I’m studying that question in vampire bats, who rely on cooperative friendships to survive. I can manipulate these friendships in the lab to understand how they form and fall apart.
an example of a colony network — who gives, who receives, who’s connected
The question
Why would an animal give up food to help another?
Often when people imagine natural selection, they think “Survival of the fittest, every organism for themself.” Why would a bat literally regurgitate its hard-earned meal to someone else then? It clearly isn’t so simple. That’s exactly what my research tries to understand. We know they prioritize helping “good” bats who help them back. But what if a long-term friend suddenly stops helping? What if you need that partner for the colony to survive? We don’t understand if and how the bats weigh these options, but I have four years to find out! Understanding cooperative relationships is not simple, so I am currently working on multiple projects to understand all of the layers to this complex problem.
Current research
Colony level social relations models
Fitting a STRAND social-relations model across all of our long-term data, separating reciprocity, kinship, and individual generosity in grooming and food sharing, and watching how bonds change over time.
Automatic bat ID with machine learning
Building a computer-vision pipeline to re-identify individual bats from video, testing whether 21 individuals are visually separable on held-out days, so we can study behavior without hand labelling days of footage.
Defection & partner choice
Experimentally manipulating whether a new bat in the colony is helpful or defective, then measuring how bats differentially invest in them: a direct causal test of reciprocity and partner-choice.
Defection & interdependence
How does response to defection change when bats are also siblings? Or what if they have been long term friends? Or what if the defective bat is their only option? These are all examples of what we might label as “interdependence”, and we want to understand how bats respond to defection differently in these scenarios.
Interested in my story and journey to science?
Photography
The wildlife I meet along the way.
Let’s talk cooperation, bats, or photography!
I reply to email within two days. Usually one.