Seminar by Professor Trine Bilde
Is sociality in spiders an evolutionary dead-end?
Social spiders are remarkable because they cooperate in nest building, prey capture and brood care, while loss of pre-mating dispersal leads to obligatory inbreeding and female-biased sex ratio. These traits lead to reductions in effective population sizes, loss of genome-wide diversity and reduced efficacy of selection, which lowers evolutionary potential and degenerates the genome. This poses the question of whether transitions to sociality is an evolutionary dead-end?
Professor Trine Bilde from Aarhus University, one of Denmark’s most eminent Evolutionary Biologists, is in town as part of Luisa Nielsen’s PhD committee next week, and has kindly agreed to give a talk on the 30th May, 0930-1030 about her work. Trine has worked on many things but recently much of her attention has been on the remarkable system that is social spiders.
Please do consider coming! She’s a great speaker and it’s a super interesting topic to anyone who likes to dig into the nuts and bolts of how evolution works.