Insect Science: Graduate Interdisciplinary Program

Andre J. Riveros

Research Interests:

I am broadly interested in cognitive ecology and sociobiology. More particular interests include the evolution of animal societies, animal navigation and brain evolution. Currently, my dissertation focuses on the cognitive and neural basis of insect sociality. As social evolution involves changes in the individual and group complexity, such new features of the behavior could be related with modification and plasticity of the nervous system, the physical substrate of the behavior. Interestingly, the predicted patterns may differ from those observed in vertebrate species exhibiting highly complex social structures. Whereas great levels of individualization characterize vertebrate societies, insect societies have evolved toward high levels of individual specialization. These differences might lead to potentially contrasting patterns of brain development and evolution.

Currently, I integrate tools from behavioral and neurobiological analysis under the direction of Dr. Wulfila Gronenberg. I focus on bumblebees, which are a fantastic model for behavioral studies involving social behavior (because of a broad scale of social complexities, from small to large colonies, one to several queens, and a genus expressing parasitic behavior), learning and memory and foraging behavior. At the neuroanatomical level, I target on neural structures called mushroom bodies, which are involved in integration of multimodal information and in processes of learning and memory. At the behavioral level, I focus on the correlation between task specialization and cognitive abilities (specially learning and memory). My ultimate goal is to understand at a broad scale (including individualized and non-individualized species) how the cognitive capacities and the neural substrate are tuned to serve the social life across different taxa.

Andre J. Riveros

Research Interests:

The Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Insect Science