PhD: Adaptive social flexibility – a powerful mechanism to cope with a rapidly changing world
The Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences (GELIFES) offers a 4-year NWO-funded PhD position for a project on “Adaptive social flexibility – a powerful mechanism to cope with a rapidly changing world”, with the Seychelles warbler (Acrocephalus sechellensis) as a model system.
The project is coordinated by Prof. Jan Komdeur (see: https://research.rug.nl/en/persons/jan-komdeur), in collaboration with Prof. Martijn Egas (https://research.rug.nl/en/persons/martijn-egas)and Prof. Hannah L. Dugdale (University of Groningen, see https://research.rug.nl/en/persons/hannah-dugdale), Prof. David S. Richardson (University of East Anglia, UK, see: https://research-portal.uea.ac.uk/en/persons/david-richardson-2) and Prof. Terry Burke (University of Sheffield, UK, see: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/biosciences/people/academic-staff/terry-burke). The student will join a lively and highly international team of post-doctoral researchers, PhD and master students working on the evolution of social behaviours and life history patterns in social animals, supported by laboratory technicians.
Especially now, in this era of rapid climate change, organisms need to adapt to reduced and unpredictable food availability. We argue that such adaptive flexibility may be facilitated by sociality, whereby animals form groups and cooperate on tasks that affect survival and reproduction (cf cooperative breeding). This project will investigate whether ‘social flexibility’, i.e. the capacity of individuals to flexibly change from solitary breeding to cooperative breeding and vice versa throughout their lifetime, is a fast and potent adaptation mechanism that provides fitness benefits to individuals and buffers populations against decline and extinction in times of environmental deterioration. We will identify when and how environmental change elicits changes in social life and how this in turn affects the capacity to cope with environmental variation and change, which has not been tested.
Our long-term study of the facultatively cooperative Seychelles warblers (SW) on Cousin Island, Seychelles, provides a uniquely suitable natural system in which to investigate this question. SWs can breed as solitary dominant pairs, but can also form breeding groups with subordinates that may or may not breed cooperatively. Hence, the SW system is a rare instance where we can study the causes and consequences of social behaviour at the individual and group levels simultaneously. They inhabit an environment where food availability – which shows considerable spatio-temporal variation – has become more erratic and unpredictable over the last couple of decades, apparently linked to changing local and global climatic conditions. Using >38 years of data our project will investigate the impact of food availability on life histories. We hypothesise that observed adjustments in social behaviour are strategic and enhance individual fitness, and consequently improve group persistence. Our project comprises three integrated and complementary work packages: First, we will investigate whether individuals react to environmental change (change in food availability and fluctuations) by forming groups and cooperating with each other. Second, we will test if this cooperation facilitates adaptation to extreme and unpredictable change (long-term dataset, experiments and three seasons of fieldwork on SWs). Then, we will use demographic models – tailored to SWs, but applicable to other species - to investigate the long-term implications of rapid environmental change on the population dynamics of social species.
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