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.

We systematically describe the diversity of rodent stripe patterns and show how it can be in part explained from simple developmental principles. We do so by using an integrated approach that combines recent molecular insights, pattern formation models, and phylogenetic analysis.

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.

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

We study hyperbolic random graphs, which are random geometric graphs in the hyperbolic plane. We show mathematically that this random graph model recapitulates a classic property of real-world complex networks: small distances between any two nodes.