2021
Sharpe, R., Garcia, J., Fernandez-Fournier, P. and Avilés, L. In revision. The evolution of kin preferences and the kin composition of social groups.
2020
2019
In this study, we describe a previously undocumented interaction between a parasitoid wasp (Zatypota sp.) and a social spider (Anelosimus eximius). We found that its larva uniquely triggered infected individuals to leave their colony and build an enclosure that serves as protection for the pupating wasp. We also found that the parasitoid wasp targets primarily younger hosts. These observations are important in highlighting the potential evolutionary benefits for parasitoid wasps to have a social host (i.e. a reliable/abundant source) and in better understanding the complexity of parasitoid-host interactions in general. Also, we made the news!
2018
We investigated the role of group size (“sociality”) in niche separation (i.e. species using different resources). Using communities of social spiders across the Americas, we found that co-occurring species differed more in sociality and body size than expected by chance. We also found that sociality had a much greater role than body size in contributing to niche separation. This is important because it is the first empirical study demonstrating the contribution sociality in niche separation, an angle often omitted by community ecologists.
My first paper! In this study, I investigated the mechanisms behind the composition of metacommunities (multiple communities spread across a landscape). I used complex spider webs in the Amazonian rainforest as a system and found that environmental characteristics of habitat and species dispersal played dominant roles in shaping the species composition, indicating non-neutral processes. This is an important finding because the drivers of metacommunity composition have rarely been empirically investigated and the mechanisms behind species compositions are still debated.
*Joint first authors