I am researching how sex, early-life nutrition, and reproductive morph affect cognition in the bull-headed dung beetle. I am performing a small battery of cognition tests on large horned males, small hornless males, and correspondingly large and small females. This test battery includes an associative learning test, a navigation test, and a test of inhibitory control. We plan to expand this work in the future to test how factors such as the microbiome and invasion history affect cognition in these insects as well.

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*Most current project

Based on the findings of a previous project (Westwick et al. 2023; see "Past research projects" below), I wanted to examine whether high- and low-aggression nurses showed differences in antennal sensitivity to different social pheromones that could explain the behavioral results we obtained. I therefore performed electroantennography (EAG), testing antennal sensitivity to alarm pheromone (isopentyl acetate) and begging pheromone (e-Beta-ocimene). I additionally wanted to compare these results to high- and low-aggression foragers from the same hives, as foragers have historically been the most common task specialist used for EAG studies.

Click on the picture below to be taken to my Publication Blog, which features short write-ups on projects that have been published already!

I collected samples of honey bee worker jelly (a glandular secretion that nurse bees give to larvae as their sole nutrition source) from age-matched larvae from 18 different hives. These hives differed in location, genetic strain, and aggression level. I am examining if any of these variables impact the levels of three critical macronutrients (proteins, lipids, and carbs) in the worker jelly.

Honey bees commonly allogroom their nestmates. Research from our lab has recently shown that bees will preferentially direct their grooming towards nestmates that are experiencing immune challenge (Carr et al. 2020). This behavior may help clean pathogens off of the surface of the bee that is receiving the grooming, but that close contact presents a risk to the groomer of catching her nestmate's pathogen. I am testing whether honey bees that participate in allogrooming—both the groomer and the recipient—show changes in immune gene expression that could help protect both parties from infection. Additionally, I am assessing whether allogrooming promotes expression of two deeply conserved, socially responsive genes in the brain due to the prosocial nature of this behavior.