MEET THE TEAM
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Dr Lauren Brent
Associate Professor at the University of Exeter's Center For Research In Animal Behaviour "I am primarily interested in the evolution of sociality. My research asks why social relationships evolved and how they are maintained. Within groups, individuals differ in their tendencies to interact with others and in how deeply embedded they are in their social networks. Across group-living species, the patterning of social interactions and the network structures that emerge from those patterns, varies. Investigating these differences allows me to determine the mechanisms that drive social relationships, their impact on individual health, aging, life-history, and fitness, and to ultimately draw conclusions about their evolved function." Dr Delphine De Moor
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter's Center For Research In Animal Behaviour "My research focuses on the evolution of social relationships: why do we and other animals form close bonds, or friendships, and why are they so important for our well-being, survival and health? To answer these questions I am taking a comparative approach across macaque species, co-building MacaqueNet, a collaborative dataset bringing all social behaviour data on macaques together. Taking advantage of this unparalleled dataset, I can explicitly test if variation in socio-ecological pressures predicts variation in social structure. Understanding which selective pressures act on within-group sociality brings us one step closer to understand the evolution of social relationships and friendship." Dr Beki Hooper
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter's Center For Research In Animal Behaviour "Understanding the informational demands of social life is fundamental to our understanding of both social and cognitive evolution, yet there are key gaps in our knowledge. Specifically, how much information individuals actually have on relationships within their social group is not well known. Through behavioural experiments on a free-ranging population of highly social non-human primates, the rhesus macaques of Cayo Santiago, I am investigating how much information individuals have on the social connections of group members. This work will allow us to gain a deeper understanding of the informational challenges posed by sociality."
Dr Erin Siracusa
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter's Center For Research In Animal Behaviour "I am a behavioural ecologist broadly interested in how social interactions shape the behaviour, fitness, and life history of individuals. My recent research has focused on understanding how social behaviour contributes to our understanding of senescence by exploring the causes and consequences of changes in social behaviour across the adult lifespan. As a research fellow on the FriendOrigins project I will be working on a novel experimental manipulation of competition levels to explore how this affects the formation of social relationships. Using a population of rhesus macaques on Cayo Santiago we will manipulate competition over food to test whether social isolation is driven by competitive exclusion. This experiment will offer unique insight into the features that shape social network structure and the flexibility of social bonds." Macaela Skelton
Lab manager at the University of Exeter's Center For Research In Animal Behaviour "I am currently helping the team to gather behavioural data from macaque researchers all over the world, which will be used to build our multi-species database. I have a particular interest in the formation of social bonds and how these consequently impact health and survival. For my MSc thesis, I investigated age-related changes in how individuals engage with social information and in turn, how group members respond to ageing individuals." |