Daniel Kronauer is a Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Social Evolution and Behavior at The Rockefeller University and an Investigator and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. His research focuses on how natural selection shapes the evolution of insect societies and on how social life is regulated at different hierarchical levels – from genes and neural circuits to individuals and colonies. He is particularly interested in how genetically identical clonal raiser ants develop into distinct castes, how workers specialise in different tasks, and how chemical communication is perceived and processed by the nervous system. By combining molecular, neurobiological, and behavioral approaches, he investigates how individual interactions give rise to collective behaviours such as decision-making, foraging, parental care, and navigation.

Talk: Ant Societies: From Behavior to Neural Circuits

The colonies of social insects are complex biological systems in which manifold interactions between individuals give rise to emergent properties that are adaptive at the group level. However, most social insects cannot be propagated in captivity or genetically manipulated, severely limiting the scope for experimentation. Over the past fifteen years, we have developed and utilized the clonal raider ant, Ooceraea biroi, as a new model species that overcomes many of these limitations, allowing us to study social dynamics and underlying mechanisms under controlled laboratory conditions. Our work has led to a deeper understanding of how ants within a colony assume distinct behavioral roles and efficiently divide labor, how they communicate, both as adults and across different developmental stages, and how these interactions result in collective behavior. Additionally, our research has shed light on how evolution has repurposed and expanded genetic, neural, and physiological mechanisms from solitary ancestors to produce highly social organisms. In this seminar, I will provide an overview of this work and discuss future directions in our research program aimed at understanding the evolution and organization of insect societies, spanning from genes to neural circuits and behavior.