Sarah Kocher: 'Leveraging natural variation to study the evolution of social behavior'

Natural variation can provide powerful insights into the genetic and environmental factors shaping the origins and evolution of complex traits. Halictid bees harbor extraordinary variation in social behavior within and between species. This variation encompasses the full spectrum of sociality, from solitary to eusocial, making halictids a model system for studying the evolution of eusociality. Building on the wealth of natural history data for this system, our lab has developed complementary genomic and experimental resources. This enables an integrative examination of the links between the proximate mechanisms underlying variation in social behavior and the ecological processes driving their evolution.