Merlijn Staps

We derive ecological conditions for the evolution of communication in a collective context and show how diverse communication strategies used by social insects (e.g., honeybee waggle dance, trail pheromones, antennal contacts) can be explained theoretically as adaptations to different ecological circumstances.

In this work, we describe the diversity of rodent stripe patterns and explain it from simple developmental principles. We do so by using an integrated approach that combines recent molecular insights, pattern formation models, and phylogenetic analysis.

In this paper, we develop a general theoretical framework for the evolution of task allocation in variable environments, applicable to multicellular organisms and social insect colonies. We derive simple and general conditions for the evolution of collective flexibility, and propose potential theoretical explanations for some puzzling empirical observations.

In this paper, we build a theoretical model for the first emergence of multicellular life cycles, starting from a unicellular ancestor. We find that diverse types of multicellular life cycles could have easily emerged early on, shaped by ancestral constraints and ecological conditions.

In this paper, we study hyperbolic random graphs, which are a recently-proposed random geometric graph model for complex networks. We show mathematically that one classic property of real-world complex networks — small distances between any two nodes — is indeed recapitulated by this random graph model.