Group living animals often show remarkable collective behavior, such as coordinated movements and nest construction. A natural question is behavioral mechanism of how group-level patterns emerge from individual-level behaviors for social interactions. However, given that these are life phenomena, coordinated collective behavior has the evolutionary history to achieve its current status.
I have challenged these questions as a behavioral ecologist to seek the intersection of proximate and ultimate causes of behaviors. During my PhD in Kyoto, I studied the mechanism of nest building and pair movement in a termite, Reticulitermes speratus. However, as my postdoctoral research expanded the field, I learned that one species' rules do not always apply to other species. I found the complex relationship between behavioral mechanisms and group-level patterns among species. The diverse structures come from the shared set of behavioral repertoire, while similar group-level patterns can emerge from differentiated individual behaviors regulating social interactions. Thus, comparative studies of collective behavior need to be at both individual and group levels.
In this talk, I will introduce my perspectives about the evolution of collective behaviors in termites. I hope this keynote will encourage ethology/behavioral ecology studies and possibly inspire cross subfields collaborations in ecology.