I invited Jonathan Pruitt to SFI to give a Colloquium talk. This is SFI’s premier talk series, and Jonathan wowed and amazed us with his recent work on social spiders. While at SFI, he also led a Research Jam, an unstructured brainstorming session for early-stage ideas, that has since become a big collaborative review paper involving several SFI researchers.
Keystone Individuals in Animal Societies: Some Pros and Cons
Socially influential individuals emerge in a variety of animal societies. Here we explore how singularly influential group members influence the long-term attributes of their societies, as well as their rise and fall in contrasting environments. We will use cooperatively breeding social spiders from the Namib and Kalahari Deserts as our lens for these investigations.
