Kerrigan Tobin

Disruption of collective behaviour correlates with reduced interaction efficiency | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Group-living organisms commonly engage in collective behaviour to respond to an ever-changing environment. As animals face environmental change, establishing the mechanisms of information used to collectively behave is critical. Western honeybees (Apis ...

🎉🎉I am SO excited to share our lab's first data paper published in ProcB @royalsociety.org! This research is part of @jlotusnguyen.bsky.social 's PhD dissertation and explores how social #behavior is organized in honey bees. 🐝 Let me share the story...!
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

24.03.2025 18:40 — 👍 23    🔁 7    💬 3    📌 1

The Cook Lab

We aim to hire someone who has experience with transcriptomics and gene editing tech to deeply explore how sensory physiology drives social behavior. We are a supportive, diverse learning environment. Learn more thecooklab.org
@IUSSI_NAS
#rnaseq #crispr
@EntsocAmerica

29.05.2024 16:16 — 👍 0    🔁 2    💬 0    📌 0

Postdoctoral Researcher

#Postdoc #Job Alert! The Cook Lab is hiring! We are excited to hire a postdoctoral researcher to study the mechanisms of social behavior in a changing environment #academia #academictwitter employment.marquette.edu/postings/21269

29.05.2024 16:16 — 👍 4    🔁 7    💬 1    📌 0

North American peeps! Please comment below when you first start seeing bumble bees! Trying to guestimate when they will be out in my region/I love mentally tracking their emergence northward :) #bees 🐝🌍🧪

14.03.2024 15:02 — 👍 28    🔁 12    💬 16    📌 0

Black and red ant split neatly down the middle head to gaster; the black half being the male alate, and the red the female worker. The black half has a wing, the red does not.

View of the other side of the creature, the red worker half.

Top down view; the single translucent wing is covering nearly the whole gaster. The head and thorax is red on the right, black on the left.

The creature, facing you, showing off the wild difference between each half. The worker mandible is like 4x the size of the alate mandible. The alate eye is roughly twice the size of the worker eye.

This creature from that nest remains and probably always will be the coolest thing I've found: the bilateral gynandromorph Polyergus longicornis; half worker, half winged male alate. A They/Them Ant. 🖤❤️
Still feels kind of surreal!
🌿🐜🧪

22.03.2024 03:03 — 👍 549    🔁 186    💬 22    📌 23

Ant Mimics - Alex Wild A great many animals mimic the form, color, and movements of ants. Some gain protection from general predators that don't eat ants, some are specialized ant predators who trick prey ants into coming c...

A gallery of non-ants, trying their best not to look like non-ants.

01.02.2024 15:51 — 👍 48    🔁 13    💬 4    📌 3

Check out www.molecular-ecology.org for information about an upcoming, free, online conservation genetics workshop: Finding creative and collaborative solutions to knowledge and resource inequity in molecular conservation research

30.01.2024 21:48 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

A series of experiments (b) measured survival (i), constitutive and induced immunity (ii), the cost of an immune response for survival under heatwave and control conditions (iii), and infection outcomes following experimental trypanosomatid exposure prior to heatwave initiation (iv) or following the heatwave treatment conclusion (v). Numbers in parentheses represent the number of source colonies providing workers for each response.

New paper "A simulated natural heatwave perturbs bumblebee immunity and resistance to infection" out now! We exposed bees to realistic heatwaves and looked survival, infection outcomes, and multiple metrics of immune function using Bombus impatiens besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

19.01.2024 15:58 — 👍 11    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 0