Welcome to the Integrative Myrmecology Research Group at the University of Texas at Tyler. We study many facets of ant evolutionary ecology, ranging from behavior, genetics, interactions with bacteria, fungi and to the environmental impacts of ant colonies across multiple scales.
INTEGRATIVE ORGANISMAL bIOLOGYPI: Jon Seal
Our research has the broad focus of understanding two aspects of the organismal biology of social insect societies and their symbioses. Our work investigates 1) how societies and symbioses function and 2) how their organismal attributes influence their biotic and physical environments. We use an integrative approach to understand how these complex organisms function and their impacts by using a variety of methods that may range from experimentation, behavioral physiology to molecular.
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Insect Microbial and Molecular EcologyPI: Katrin Kellner
Our research is broadly interested in the evolutionary ecology of social insects. Using traditional and next generation sequencing methods we explore mating systems, population genetics of ants and their microbial partners. We also have a growing interest in landscape ecology and conservation genetics. While ants are generally not thought of as ecologically threatened, many ant species serve important ecological functions and may have mating systems that predispose them to habitat fragmentation and degradation.
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Funding: Our research has been generously funded by the National Science Foundation under grants IOS-0920138, DEB-1354629, IOS-1552822, DEB-2230334, Texas Ecolab and the Texas Military Forces.
