Professor Nick Davies

Research interest is in Behavioural Ecology, the study of behavioural adaptations in relation to ecological and social conditions.  In theory, natural selection should favour behavioural strategies which best promote an individual’s ability to pass copies of its genes on to future generations.  This creates conflicts in animal populations, not only conflicts between rivals for territories and mates but also conflicts within seemingly harmonious ventures such as male-female pairs cooperating to rear offspring.  His work attempts to elucidate the nature of these conflicts and to understand how they are resolved.

I am interested in how behaviour evolves in a changing world.  My current work focuses on the interactions between cuckoos and their hosts, including: how cuckoos trick their hosts and how the hosts defend themselves against cuckoo parasitism; how cuckoo trickery and host defences co-evolve; how cuckoo chicks manipulate hosts when they beg for food; how hosts vary their costly defences in response to levels of parasitism, by both individual and social learning. The work involves a long-term study and field experiments on Wicken Fen.