Professor Guillaume Chomicki from our Department of Biosciences has been awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize for his internationally recognised research in evolutionary biology. <\/p>\n
The prizes, awarded by the Leverhulme Trust, recognise outstanding researchers whose work has already gained international recognition and whose future careers show exceptional promise. <\/p>\n
Guillaume conducts world-leading research into how partnerships between species evolve, persist and break down. <\/p>\n
He is particularly interested in why different species – such as insects and plants – form partnerships and what causes these relationships to change or break down. <\/p>\n
Partnerships over millions of years <\/p>\n
Much of Guillaume’s work focuses on the Hydnophytinae, a group of around 100 plants that grow on the branches of rainforest trees across Australasia. <\/p>\n
They form swollen, hollow stems divided into chambers where ant colonies live. <\/p>\n
In return, the ants feed the plant with their waste and with the debris they carry home. <\/p>\n
Some of these plants rely on a single specialist ant, others accept many kinds, and some have given up ants altogether. <\/p>\n
Over roughly 10 million years, the partnership has been lost 12 separate times. <\/p>\n
That is a higher rate for its size than any other known group, which makes it what Guillaume calls a ‘natural laboratory for cooperation’. <\/p>\n
Guillaume’s work showed that the loose, open partnerships are the ones that fall apart. <\/p>\n
Every loss began in plants that accepted many kinds of ant, while the specialised partnerships never collapsed. <\/p>\n
Ants as farmers <\/p>\n
Guillaume’s best-known discovery came in Fiji, where he found that the ant Philidris nagasau farms six species of Squamellaria plant. <\/p>\n
The ants sow the seeds in cracks in tree bark, fertilise the seedlings, guard them from plant-eaters and harvest food from them. <\/p>\n
Over the three million years of the partnership, the ants have lost the ability to build nests of their own and instead depend on their crop for a home. <\/p>\n
Published in Nature Plants in 2016, it was the first known case of true plant agriculture by an animal other than humans, and it made headlines around the world. <\/p>\n
Bold directions <\/p>\n
In 2024, Guillaume and an international team studied carnivorous pitcher plants and their remarkable ability to capture insects. <\/p>\n
Their research showed how separate biological changes can come together during evolution to create a new and complex feature. <\/p>\n
The seven-year study featured on the Science journal’s front cover. <\/p>\n
Last year, Guillaume’s research, also published in Science, showed how Fijian Squamellaria plants can maintain partnerships with several competing ant colonies. <\/p>\n
The Philip Leverhulme Prize fund will help Guillaume take his ant-plant research in new directions, including exploring whether hidden partners such as microbes help bind ants and plants together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Professor Guillaume Chomicki from our Department of Biosciences has been awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize for his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":637244,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[111,139,69,147],"class_list":["post-637243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637243\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/637244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}