Dill, Lawrence M.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
My major research interests are in the development and testing of cost-benefit models of behaviour, and experimental studies of the decision rules used by animals to ensure adaptive behaviour in various contexts. The emphasis is on understanding how behaviours maximize individual fitness; this is achieved by experimental analyses of the benefits and costs of the various behavioural alternatives available to the animal.

My research program has emphasized foraging and predator avoidance behaviours, and the interactions (trade-offs) between these. We have shown experimentally that animals choose among foraging patches using information about both food availability and predation risk; when these two indices of habitat quality are in conflict (i.e., the richer patch is also the most dangerous one) the animals trade-off these variables in an adaptive fashion. Predation risk potentially may have effects on a variety of other behaviours (especially reproduction) and life-history traits, and my students and I have also examined some of these.

PUBLICATIONS

 * [[Media:Dill 2002.pdf| Dill, M. 2002. Taxonomy of the migrating herdsman species of the genus Dolichoderus Lund, 1831, with remarks on the systematics of other Southeast-Asian Dolichoderus. Pp. 17-113 in: Dill, M., Williams, D. J. and Maschwitz, U. Herdsmen ants and their mealybug partners. Abhandlungen der Senckenbergischen Naturforschenden Gesellschaft Frankfurt am Main. 557:1-373. PDF]]