Research
Wasp Body Size Impacts Brain Resource Allocation
This is a relatively older publication (2018) that I co-authored with my adviser, Dr. Sean O’Donnell, and lab members Dr. Susan Bulova and Katherine Fiocca, titled “Size constraints and sensory adaptations affect mosaic brain evolution in paper wasps (Vespidae: Epiponini)”. By looking across paper wasp species, we can see really big and really small wasps – in fact, the biggest species in our study was 25 times the size of the smallest! Does getting so tiny have an impact on brain size – or do brains just scale 1:1 with the wasp’s body size? Do different regions of the brain stay relatively larger as body size Read more…