Calum is a first-year graduate student in the EEPB program, broadly interested in the evolutionary dynamics underpinning social behaviour in both interspecific and intraspecific contexts. He spent both his BA at the University of Oxford and MSc at the University of Copenhagen exploring the mutualistic relationship between Atta and Acromyrmex leaf-cutting ants and their farmed fungal cultivars. In joining the Queller/Strassmann lab, he is looking to take advantage of the flexibility of D. discoideum to test similar ideas at the microbiological level. He is especially fascinated by the prospect of investigating how D. discoideum’s social phenotype influences its own complex farming phenotype, mediated by bacteria of the genus Paraburkholderia.
Sociality, Multicellularity, and Predation 