- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Her seminar, titled "Wasps Know Each Other's Faces; Cooperation, Communication, and Cognition in the Polistes," will take place from 12:10 to 1 p.m. in 122 Briggs.
"Social behavior and communication are fundamentally linked," Tibbetts says in her abstract. "In the short term, stable social interactions depend on reliable communication. Over the long term, social behavior and communication systems coevolve to shape the way animals look, think, and act. I will use visual communication in paper wasps as a model to explore how the coevolution of social behavior and communication influences morphology, physiology, and behavior. I will focus on two common wasp species with different types of social communication, Polistes fuscatus, which have visual signals used for individual recognition and Polistes dominulus, which have visual signals of fighting ability. Specific topics to be discussed include the role of social punishment in the evolution of honest communication, how complex communication systems shape cognitive evolution, and the feedbacks between signals, social behavior, and endocrine titers."
Tibbetts researches behavioral evolution, organismal biology and evolutionary processes.
"My research explores how individual behavior influences social groups and populations," she writes on her website. "I use a variety of techniques, including field observations, manipulative experiments, mathematical modeling, and phylogenetic comparisons. Some of the broad issues I'm interested in include:
- Cooperation. Why do animals cooperate? At the individual level, animals can choose to cooperate or behave selfishly. What factors influence that decision? And what are the larger scale impacts of cooperation and conflict?
- Communication. Animals communicate a huge range of information: relatedness, sex, quality, individual identity, etc. What are the underlying design principles for these different types of signals? What can signal development and function tell us about the evolution of communication systems?
Currently, her research uses Polistes paper wasps to address these questions. "Polistes fuscatus paper wasps use variable facial markings to recognize their nestmates as individuals, much like humans use facial features to identify individuals," Tibbetts says. "In contrast, Polistes dominulus have evolved different visual signals, using black facial spots of varying size and shape to signal quality rather than individual identity. P. dominulus with facial patterns that do not honesty reflect their quality (cheaters) are punished, suffering costly social interactions. Their combination of complex social behavior, visual communication, and adaptability make paper wasps a rich system evolutionary research."
Tibbetts received her doctorate in neurobiology and behavior from Cornell University in 2003. She served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Insect Science, University of Arizona, from 2003 to 2005 before joining the University of Michigan faculty.
Plans call for video-recording the seminar for later posting on UCTV.
(Editor's Note: see upcoming seminars hosted by the UC Davis Department of Entomology.)