ONGOING RESEARCH PROJECTS
Learn more about the Sociable Weaver project
The Sociable Weaver project is a long term project initiated in 1993 by Mark Anderson (currently executive director of Birdlife South Africa). Dr Rita Covas (CIBIO, University of Porto, Portugal and Percy FitzPatrick Institute) and Dr Claire Doutrelant are now running the project, which involves annual individual captures as well as an intensive monitoring of breeding.
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The sociable weaver project featured in the very popular South African TV show 50/50
The cost of cooperation
Cost and benefits of group living in cooperatevely breeding species
Living in group implies both costs and benefits, and sociality is expected to evolved when benefits outweight the costs. Identify and quantify those costs and benefits is primordial to better understand sociality and the underlying mechanisms of its evolution.
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Using long-term data set of Alpine marmots (Marmota marmota) and sociable weavers (Philetairus socius), a mammalian and an avian cooperatively breeding species, I investigate how social factors (group size, composition, number of helpers, etc...) influence individuals' physiological status, reproductive performance and survival.
Sociable weaver fieldwork - Benfontein farm
Physiological costs of dominance
This project focuses on the physiological costs of helping in the sociable weaver (Philetairus socius), a cooperatively breeding bird endemic of southern Africa. Cooperation can only arise if benefits are greater than the costs, and across cooperative species there has been great effort to quantify the benefits but little attention has been given to the costs. Nonetheless, understanding the costs associated with cooperation could help us to explain the variation in investment in cooperative behaviour and therefore mechanisms involved in the evolution of this behaviour.
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I am using both correlational and experimental approaches to investigate the short- and long-term costs linked to nestling feeding in terms of oxidative stress, telomere length and survival.
Collaborators:
Dr Rita Covas / Dr Claire Doutrelant (Univerty of Porto, University of Cape Town, CEFE)
Dr Benjamin Rey (University of Lyon 1)
Dr Francois Criscuolo (University of Strasbourg)
Dr Bruno Faivre (University of Burgundy)
Despite the well known benefits associated with dominant status in social species, dominant individuals also face higher costs than subordinates due to higher frequency of aggressive interaction, signalisation of social status, higher reproductive activity, etc...
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The aim of this project is to quantify the physiological costs of dominance (using oxidative stress makers) and to assess how individuals' oxidative status varies through breeding season according to individual social status.
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This project is part of the Master project of Liliana Silva (CIBIO, University of Porto)
PAST RESEARCH PROJECTS
Evolutionay consequences of intra-sexual competition in social species (2008-2012)
Sperm maturation process under different degree of sperm competition (2008)
Master project (2nd year), under the supervision of Pr. Tim Birkhead, University of Sheffield
Ontogeny of dominance in a context of intra-sexual competition (2007)
Master project (1st year), under the supervision of Dr. Pierre-Yves Henry, MNHN
Benefits of leaving the group in a fission-fusion system (2013-2014)
In collaboration with Dr Olivier Pays-Volard, University of Angers
PhD project, supervised by Dr Dominique Allaine and Dr Aurelie Cohas, University Lyon 1
Alpine marmot fieldwork - French alps
Collaborators:
Dr Rita Covas / Dr Claire Doutrelant (Univerty of Porto, University of Cape Town, CEFE)
Dr Aurelie Cohas (University of Lyon 1)
Dr Benjamin Rey (University of Lyon 1)
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Learn more about the Alpine marmot project!