Publications by Laurent Keller

Targeted worker removal reveals a lack of flexibility in brood transport specialisation with no compensatory gain in efficiency

Laurent Keller, Mahmut Selman Sakar, Fazil Emre Uslu

Division of labour is widely thought to increase the task efficiency of eusocial insects. Workers can switch their task to compensate for sudden changes in demand, providing flexible task allocation. In combination with automated tracking technology, we de ...

Nature Research2024

The evolution of behavioral cues and signaling in displaced communication

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller

Displaced communication, whereby individuals communicate regarding a subject that is not immediately present (spatially or temporally), is one of the key features of human language. It also occurs in a few animal species, most notably the honeybee, where t ...

2023

Social isolation shortens lifespan through oxidative stress in ants

Alessandro Crespi, Laurent Keller

Social isolation negatively affects health, induces detrimental behaviors, and shortens lifespan in social species. Little is known about the mechanisms underpinning these effects because model species are typically short-lived and non-social. Using coloni ...

Nature Research2023

Precise tactile stimulation of worker ants by a robotic manipulator reveals that individual responses are density‐ and context‐dependent

Laurent Keller, Alexandre Tuleu, Matthias Rüegg, Mahmut Selman Sakar

2024

Sexual conflict drives male manipulation of female postmating responses in Drosophila melanogaster

Laurent Keller, Brian Dennis Hollis

In many animals, females respond to mating with changes in physiology and behavior that are triggered by molecules transferred by males during mating. In Drosophila melanogaster, proteins in the seminal fluid are responsible for important female postmating ...

National Academy of Sciences2019

Tissue- and sex-specific small RNAomes reveal sex differences in response to the environment

Laurent Keller, Pierre Gönczy, Frédéric Schütz, Alexandra Bezler, Raffaella Conconi

RNA interference (RNAi) related pathways are essential for germline development and fertility in metazoa and can contribute to inter- and trans-generational inheritance. In the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, environmental double-stranded RNA provided by ...

2019

Social network plasticity decreases disease transmission in a eusocial insect

Alessandro Crespi, Laurent Keller

Animal social networks are shaped by multiple selection pressures, including the need to ensure efficient communication and functioning while simultaneously limiting disease transmission. Social animals could potentially further reduce epidemic risk by alt ...

American Association for the Advancement of Science2018

Sexual selection shapes development and maturation rates in Drosophila

Laurent Keller, Brian Dennis Hollis

Explanations for the evolution of delayed maturity usually invoke trade-offs mediated by growth, but processes of reproductive maturation continue long after growth has ceased. Here, we tested whether sexual selection shapes the rate of posteclosion matura ...

Wiley2017

Automated computer-based detection of encounter behaviours in groups of honeybees

Alessandro Crespi, Laurent Keller

Honeybees form societies in which thousands of members integrate their behaviours to act as a single functional unit. We have little knowledge on how the collaborative features are regulated by workers' activities because we lack methods that enable collec ...

Springer Nature2017

Oral transfer of chemical cues, growth proteins and hormones in social insects

Laurent Keller, Oksana Riba Grognuz, Daniel Ortiz Trujillo, Laure Menin

Social insects frequently engage in oral fluid exchange trophallaxis between adults, and between adults and larvae. Although trophallaxis is widely considered a food-sharing mechanism, we hypothesized that endogenous components of this fluid might underlie ...

Elife Sciences Publications Ltd2016

Uncovering Latent Behaviors in Ant Colonies

Patrick Thiran, Laurent Keller, Matthias Grossglauser, Mohamed Kafsi, Raphaël Braunschweig

Many biological systems exhibit collective behaviors that strengthen their adaptability to their environment, compared to more solitary species. Describing these behaviors is challenging yet necessary in order to understand these biological systems. We pro ...

SIAM2016

Effects of ploidy and sex-locus genotype on gene expression patterns in the fire ant Solenopsis invicta

Laurent Keller, Oksana Riba Grognuz, Chitsanu Khurewathanakul

Males in many animal species differ greatly from females in morphology, physiology and behaviour. Ants, bees and wasps have a haplodiploid mechanism of sex determination whereby unfertilized eggs become males while fertilized eggs become females. However, ...

Royal Soc2014

Selection methods regulate evolution of cooperation in digital evolution

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller, Pawel Lichocki

A key, yet often neglected, component of digital evolution and evolutionary models is the 'selection method' which assigns fitness (number of offspring) to individuals based on their performance scores (efficiency in performing tasks). Here, we study with ...

Royal Soc2014

Evolving team compositions by agent swapping

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller, Pawel Lichocki

Optimizing collective behavior in multiagent systems requires algorithms to find not only appropriate individual behaviors but also a suitable composition of agents within a team. Over the last two decades, evolutionary methods have been shown to be a prom ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers2013

Using robots to understand social behavior

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller, Sara Mitri

A major challenge in studying social behaviour stems from the need to disentangle the behaviour of each individual from the resulting collective. One way to overcome this problem is to construct a model of the behaviour of an individual, and observe whethe ...

Wiley-Blackwell2013

Historical contingency affects signaling strategies and competitive abilities in evolving populations of simulated robots

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller

One of the key innovations during the evolution of life on earth has been the emergence of efficient communication systems, yet little is known about the causes and consequences of the great diversity within and between species. By conducting experimental ...

National Academy of Sciences2012

Neural networks as mechanisms to regulate division of labor

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller, Pawel Lichocki

In social insects, workers perform a multitude of tasks such as foraging, nest construction and brood rearing without central control of how work is allocated among individuals. It has been suggested that workers choose a task by responding to stimuli gath ...

2012

Limitations of response thresholds models of division of labor

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller, Pawel Lichocki

High levels of cooperation are often cited as the primary reasons for the ecological success of social insects. In social insects, workers perform a multitude of tasks such as foraging, nest construction and brood rearing without central control of how wor ...

The MIT Press2012

Differences in the Concept of Fitness Between Artificial Evolution and Natural Selection

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller, Pawel Lichocki

Evolutionary algorithms were proposed to automatically find solutions to computational problems, much like evolution discovers new adaptive traits. Lately, they have been used to address challenging questions about the evolution of modularity, the genetic ...

The MIT Press2012

Relatedness influences signal reliability in evolving robots

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller, Sara Mitri

Communication is an indispensable component of animal societies, yet many open questions remain regarding the factors affecting the evolution and reliability of signalling systems. A potentially important factor is the level of genetic relatedness between ...

2011