Presenter: Sarah Kocher

Description: Natural variation can provide powerful insights into the genetic and environmental factors shaping the origins and evolution of complex traits. Sweat bees harbor extraordinary variation in social behavior within and between species. Throughout their evolutionary history, these bees have repeatedly gained and lost sociality, resulting in many closely related yet behaviorally variable species. Leveraging this comparative lens, we have integrated behavioral and life history data with theoretical and genomic approaches to characterize the key environmental, molecular, and physiological mechanisms that shape variation in social behavior. Our ecological and theoretical studies have demonstrated that the interaction between season length and development time are sufficient to drive social evolution in sweat bees, revealing a major role for the environment in shaping social variation in this group. Using comparative genomics, we have discovered a core set of genes that show convergent and complementary patterns of selection when social behavior is gained and lost, including genes that regulate binding and transport of an ancient insect, developmental hormone. We find differences in the levels of this hormone in the brain across different social forms and across varying degrees of social experience in multiple social insect systems, suggesting that altered hormonal uptake in the brain may be an important modulator of social behavior across both developmental and evolutionary timescales. Taken together, this work broadens our understanding of the factors that shape the evolution of social behavior across different levels of biological complexity.

Bio: Sarah is an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. She studies socially variable bees (solitary, social, and socially flexible) to understand the factors that shape the evolution of social behavior. Her lab integrates methods from many different areas of biology, from evolutionary and population genomics to neurobiology and field ecology.

Hosted by: Professor Nader Pourmand & UC Santa Cruz BME Department

Zoom link: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/96489709770?pwd=f530fHJLzGQi6xlyrsHaIZ9hPGqCFO.1