Division of labour

Division of labour is when cooperating individuals specialise to perform different tasks. Division occurs across the tree of life, from bacteria to birds, and represents an extreme form of cooperation, which is hard to explain from an evolutionary perspective. This project will investigate the evolutionary forces that lead to division of labour. The project could be taken in a number of directions. In particular: (1) Exploiting genomic data from bacteria; (2) Across species comparative studies in insects (3) Experimental evolution in bacteria; (3) Development of mathematical models. To get an idea of the specifics of what we do, see recent papers at http://zoo-web02.zoo.ox.ac.uk/group/west/pubs.html.