Across nearly 5,000 kilometres of Sub-Saharan Africa, researchers will manipulate wasp colonies in deserts, rainforests, and savannas to test whether harsh climates force animals to cooperate. Biologists have long known that cooperative species cluster in arid or unpredictable climates, but no one knows why. This project tackles that gap by studying a single wasp species—*Belonogaster juncea*—across the continent’s full climatic range. The researchers will remove and add individuals, track social networks with AI, and dissect brains and genes to see whether aridity makes cooperation more valuable, whether seasonal climates drive wasps into specialist roles, and whether conflict becomes too risky in harsh conditions. This is fundamental science. It will not produce a new battery or a medical treatment. But understanding why cooperation emerges under certain climates could reshape evolutionary biology, much as inclusive fitness theory did decades ago. The results may help predict how social insects—and the ecosystems they support—will shift as the planet warms. The project also builds research capacity in Cameroon, Kenya, and South Africa, and its AI tools for analysing animal behaviour could be adapted by ecologists and museum scientists worldwide.
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Explaining animal cooperation has been a central ambition of biology since Darwin. We now know that climate plays a crucial but mysterious role in social evolution: comparisons across the planet (in birds, insects, and mammals) have found that the distribution of cooperative species is linked to climatic factors, including aridity and unpredictable rainfall. However, it remains unclear why these global patterns exist. How is cooperation among individuals directly influenced by climate? Solving this riddle demands high-resolution, within-species studies across climatic zones, including rigorous experimental tests in the wild. This project will establish the largest within-species study of cooperation ever attempted – combining field experiments, longitudinal observation, theoretical modelling, and integrative studies of neuroanatomy, gene expression, and morphometrics in a powerful new system of social wasps that span a vast climatic range of more than 5000 km across Sub-Saharan Africa. For decades, the strongest arena for uncovering the rules governing social behaviour has been ‘cooperative breeding’ (animals raising others’ offspring). Exploring cooperative breeding has transformed biology, ultimately leading to the general theory of behaviour that now underpins our understanding of all life on Earth, from bacteria to baboons (‘inclusive fitness theory’). Among cooperatively-breeding animals, Africa’s long-neglected but widespread wasps (Belonogaster juncea) are ideally suited for uncovering the links between climate and cooperation. From arid deserts to lush rainforests, they inhabit an extraordinary diversity of climates. They offer small, manipulable groups (individuals can be removed and added), high replication (often hundreds of nests within a few kilometres), ready dissection, and easy observation (allowing tracking of individuals over time and space). Because we have already conducted pilot studies (confirming wasps respond to manipulation and generating promising genetic results), obtained research permits, and established local collaborations in three African countries (Cameroon, Kenya, South Africa), we are well-placed to study cooperation at this unprecedented continental scale. We will tackle four objectives, targeting 140 sites across Africa that span wide spectrums of aridity and seasonality. First, we will reveal whether aridity amplifies the value of cooperation, conducting field experiments in rainforests, savannas, deserts, and temperate highlands. Second, we will uncover whether harsh climates promote peaceful cooperation by making conflict too risky, deploying cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) to dissect social networks in the wild. Third, we will test the core prediction that seasonal climates drive members of cooperative groups to adopt specialist roles, combining approaches to dissect molecular and morphological phenotypes (micro-CT-scanning, gene expression, and AI-driven morphometrics). Finally, we will examine which climatic conditions likely fostered the dawn of cooperation in the ancient ancestors of ants, bees, and wasps, developing advanced simulations and mathematical models. The vast geographic scope of this project, spanning nearly the entire African continent, will transform the field of social evolution. Our results will be of major interest for biologists studying cooperation, conflict, fitness, climatic gradients, and behavioural variation, as well as to social scientists, and provide a baseline for predicting how social insects will respond to climate change. Moreover, our AI deployment will benefit researchers in behaviour, ecology, and museum science. Our international team (UK, USA, Cameroon, Kenya, South Africa, Taiwan) will promote equitable benefit-sharing and capacity-building in Africa. Finally, we will provide outreach across continents, enthusing wide audiences about animal societies, extraordinary insects, and the potential for ‘big picture’ experiments to solve the fundamental outstanding riddles in biology.
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