Insect Cognition lab
Royal Holloway University of London
ERC Project: BeeDanceGap
2016-2021
Researchers: Elli Leadbeater, Fabio Manfredini, Matt Hasenjager
Our ERC project focuses upon the proximate and ultimate evolutionary drivers of waggle-dance communication in honeybees. We use neural transcriptomics to understand the genomic basis for dancing and dance following, and social network analyses to assay the dance's importance as a communication system in different ecological contexts. You can find the project website here.
Leverhulme Trust Project: Cognition in the Wild
2017-2020
Researchers: Elli Leadbeater, Chris Pull, Greg Pasquier
We are interested in the costs and benefits of learning and memory in bees. To assay them, we measure early, medium and long-term memory in the lab, and relate these to fitness in the wild.
Cognition in a changing world
Cognition in a changing world
2014- ongoing
Researchers: Ash Samuelson, Harry Siviter
We use colony-level fitness assays, learning assays and land-use analysis to understand how bees are affected by anthropogenic stressors including urbanisation and pesticide exposure
Cognitive biases
2017- ongoing
Researcher: Romain Willemet
We are interested in how the parameters of learning vary across evolutionary contexts, using lab-based bumblebees as a model.