I am interested in mutualistic, symbiotic, and parasitic interactions between species. I am particularly interested in how chemosensory and/or visual systems interact with the physiology of the whole organism to impact on the ecology and evolution of multi-trophic systems. For example, my students and I study fungus farming by termites where we are investigating how termites prevent parasitic fungi from invading their crops of mutualistic fungi. We study ant-plants and measure the costs and benefits to the plants of harbouring ants to protect plants against herbivory. We use stable isotopes to investigate how much plants feed ants and how much nutrition ants in turn provide to the plants. We investigate the highly species-specific mutualism between figs and their pollinating fig wasps. This nursery-pollination mutualism is subject to parasitism by several species-specific non-pollinating wasps whose brood also develop within the fig syconium nursery. We investigate long- and short-range chemically-mediated host location mechanisms in this complex system in which galling and parasitoid wasps compete for egg-laying space and hosts within the fig syconium. We also study mate location mechanisms in fig wasps besides mechanisms by which nematodes inhabiting figs find appropriate vectors to be transported between fig syconia. In addition, we also investigate the role of predatory ants in influencing fig wasp survival and behaviour. We study the chemical and visual signals employed by flowers to attract pollinators at a community-level. We are interested in differences between the day and the night in plant signal–animal receiver systems. In the past we have also worked on the visual ecology of predation in flower-visiting crab spiders, chemically-mediated mate location strategies in ant-mimicking spiders, the visual ecology of nocturnal carpenter bees and the nutritional ecology of herbivorous giant squirrels.

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