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Habitat quality measured through the psychology of insect pollinators
Project Description
There is growing evidence that some species of insects are sentient – experiencing positive and negative emotion-like states including the capacity to enjoy and to experience pain, but these have so far only been investigated in laboratory conditions. What if we could measure pollinator-subjective habitat quality as experienced by the animals concerned? Wild pollinators might suffer from stressors related to habitat deterioration and the accompanying difficulties in locating suitable forage, mates or nesting opportunities. This is recognised as an ecological problem, but the question of psychological welfare has not been addressed. Here we develop a battery of behavioural and physiological methods to assess the psychological welfare of farmed and wild insects, depending on the conditions to which they are exposed. We will use cognitive bias tests to assess emotion-like states, motivational trade-off experiments and tests of conditioned place preference. Physiological tests to measure psychological stress levels will also be developed, and we will work towards their quantification by non-invasive methods. It is hoped that the work will provide wholly new angles for nature conservation, motivated not just by the insects’ usefulness to humans, but also by empathy to the animals’ plight, a key ingredient in the conservation of “classical” (e.g. mammalian) conservation icons.
Research themes
Project Specific Training
The student will be trained in the world's leading lab in pollinator behaviour of principal supervisor, with input on bioinformatics from the co-supervisor. They will be instructed in state-of-the art methods of behaviour analysis, including AI-powered tools such as DeepLabCut and Sleap. They will learn and develop new physiological, non-invasive methods to measure the welfare of insects. Our teams regularly publish in the finest multidisciplinary journals such as Nature and Science and the student will be trained in generating the sort of science and manuscripts that get published there. They will participate in weekly lab meetings with a world-class international team of young scientists and also have weekly one-on-one meetings with the supervisors.
Potential Career Trajectory
The main supervisor's (Chittka's) focus in training PhD students has always been on fostering experimental and intellectual creativity and independence, with considerable successes especially in the academic sector where many of my former students are now international research stars. Chittka gives young scientists intellectual ownership of their projects very early in their careers. As a result, four of his students (Selene Al-Khudhairy, Anna Dornhaus, Steffen Schürkens, Sarah Arnold) each had a Nature or Science paper even before they completed their PhDs. Students are encouraged to present their work at conferences from early in their PhD studies, and several have won prizes for the best talks or posters at conferences. Many of Chittka's former mentees have gone on to extraordinary successes. For example, 3 advisees (Profs Ellouise Leadbeater, Mathieu Lihoreau and Heather Whitney) have later secured ERC grants. The latter also won a L'Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science International Award. Many former junior team members are now full professors at prestigious universities, e.g. Prof. Anna Dornhaus (PhD 2002): University of Arizona, Tucson; Prof. Ellouise Leadbeater (PhD 2007): Royal Holloway University of London; Prof. Fei Peng (PhD 2016) is now Department Head of Psychology at Southern Medical University (China); Prof Li Li (PhD 2017): Jiangnan University (China). Our CASE partner, Pollinatework have developed Sensibee (https://sensibee.io), a platform for automated monitoring of pollinators in natural environments. Pollinatework have proven expertise in insect monitoring and computer vision and a track record of making complex technology accessible to non-experts. These skills complement the expertise available in the supervisory team. We believe this potential CASE partnership provides value by combining academic research excellence with real-world technology development and deployment experience, while ensuring the student gains both technical and commercial skills.
Project supervisor/s
Prof Lars Chittka
Biological and Behavioural Sciences
QMUL
l.chittka@qmul.ac.uk
Prof Yannick Wurm
School of Biological and Chemical Sciences
QMUL
y.wurm@qmul.ac.uk
Supervision balance
60:40