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Plenary SpeakersHamilton Lecture Nick Davies Naturalists are familiar with the often exquisite fit between an organism's behaviour and the demands of its physical and social environment. So the sight of a little warbler busily feeding a young cuckoo ten times its own body mass comes as a shock. Why is the warbler apparently being so stupid? In his talk Nick will celebrate the wonderful interactions between brood parasites and their hosts, and use studies of them to illustrate how ideas from behavioural ecology have evolved over the last fifty years. In particular he will discuss the fruitful interplay between: theory and natural history; comparative studies and experiments; and questions concerning mechanism, function and evolution. Nick is arguably one of the founders of modern behavioural ecology, the study of behavioural adaptations in relation to ecological and social conditions. In his monograph on brood parasites, Nick says: 'Cuckoos inspire our wonder for Nature's ingenuity and allow us to unravel the forces of natural selection by combining the pleasures of bird watching with simple field experiments' - a statement that aptly illustrates his own approach to science; an elegant combination of theory, observation and experiment. With John Krebs, Nick produced the important series of edited volumes on behavioural ecology published between 1978-1997 that strongly influenced the development of our discipline. 
Mats Olsson
Mats is an evolutionary biologist with a background in mating system and life history ecology. His research models are mostly small reptiles and amphibians. The ease with which they can be kept in the lab and monitored in the wild, facilitates Mats’ interdisciplinary research from proximate mechanisms to ongoing evolution in free-ranging populations, in particular with respect to genetic effects on fitness. A combination of molecular genetics and cell biology techniques, in collaboration with biochemists and endocrinologists, allows Mats to research links between reactive oxygen species, hormone profiles, life history traits (e.g., ageing) and their molecular and quantitative genetic underpinnings. Nina is an evolutionary biologist with research interests focused on the evolutionary ecology of sex. Her research examines why females of nearly all animals tend to mate multiply, and explores the direct and indirect benefits to females of polyandry. Nina has worked extensively on various aspects of sexual selection and sexual conflict, in particular on the role of selfish genetic elements in reproductive biology. Selfish genetic elements are found in all living organisms and can cause reproductive incompatibilities and sex ratio distortion. Nina is looking at the interactions between such genetic elements and adaptive female mating patterns. Louise is the co-director, along with Peter Henzi, of the De Hoop Baboon project and the Karoo Vervet Project in South Africa. Her research programme centres on the broad issue of how ecology shapes patterns of sociality, and includes work on maternal investment strategies, cooperation and biological markets, sexual conflict, juvenile development, group-level processes of coordination and decision-making and the evolutionary ecology of the Papio baboons. She has also conducted research on human children, and is interested in how culture and biology interact with respect to human cognitive evolution and development. In her talk, she will discuss how behavioural complexity and cognitive complexity can be two very different things, and how a broader embodied perspective on behaviour and cognition may help us to appreciate the interesting differences, as well as the similarities, between humans and our primate relatives. Mariana leads a team of researchers who investigate reproductive processes that occur around the time of fertilization. Their molecular/genetic studies focus primarily on Drosophila, because of its genetic/genomic tools and resources, easily manipulated reproductive biology, and role as a model system for understanding analogous processes in people and in insect vectors of disease. In her talk Mariana will focus on the actions of seminal proteins that female flies receive from their mates. These proteins modify the mated females' behavior and reproductive physiology. She will describe how males' seminal proteins work together with females' molecules and physiology to stimulate egg production and sperm storage within mated females. Mariana will contrast this synergism with the observation that a significant fraction of seminal proteins have evolved rapidly at the sequence level. She will suggest models to reconcile these different areas. Jens’ main focus of research is on the question of how and why animals live in groups. Two approaches to the study of group-living particularly fascinate him. One is the use of social network analysis to study the social fine-structure of animal populations to get a better understanding of reciprocal altruism, the transmission of information, and diseases. The other approach uses individual-based models to study the mechanisms and functions of collective behaviours. In particular Jens is interested in decision-making processes in groups using both fish shoals and human crowds as study organisms. One of his main new developments is Robofish – a robot that can be controlled from a computer and used to manipulate the behaviour of live fish. In his talk, Jens will discuss the theoretical foundations of collective behaviour and derive some predictions for animal groups. These predictions will be tested in a set of experiments that explore human crowd dynamics and utilise Robofish to manipulate decision-making processes in live shoals of fish. I am an evolutionary biologist whose main interest is the evolution of social behaviours, such as cooperation, altruism, spite, mutualism, parasite virulence and sex allocation. I use a mixture of techniques including theory, experiment and across species comparative studies. My empirical work utilises a range of organisms, including bacteria, protozoa, insects (especially parasitoid wasps), fish, birds and mammals. | |
