The impact of climate on cooperation

Understanding how cooperation evolves is a major cross-disciplinary research ambition. Recently, in biology, a new picture of cooperation has begun to come into focus, due to a series of global analyses collating decades of natural history observations across animals. Excitingly, in mammals, birds, and insects, global mapping projects have revealed that the distribution of animal cooperation is linked to climatic factors, including aridity and unpredictable rainfall. These findings have established a new frontier: to understand how cooperation evolves – and how the world’s social animals will react to climate change – we need to understand why climate matters. However, almost all work in this area has been based on between-species correlations gleaned from the literature. There is an urgent need for ambitious within-species experimental studies of cooperation across climates, revealing causal effects. SOCIALEARTH will address this gap, illuminating how climate shapes cooperation at a trailblazing geographical scale.SOCIALEARTH combines within-species behavioural experiments involving thousands of wasps across Africa, cutting-edge modelling, and global meta-analyses. The result will form the geographically-largest within-species experimental study of animal social behaviour ever attempted, spanning 3,000 miles across Africa, from rainforests to savannas, grasslands, and deserts. Across the continent, I have established collaborations, pilot studies, field-sites, permits, and genomic resources, and I am therefore uniquely placed to pursue a feasible study at a continental scale for the first time.SOCIALEARTH tackles three objectives. Which climates trigger cooperation? Which climates ensure cooperation is stable? Which climates fuel tighter cooperation? Each will be tackled by combining within-species fieldwork across climatic gradients, comparative analysis, and evolutionary theory – in the vanguard of a new climate-focused vision of cooperation in the wild.