Natalie Lemanski- PhD
- Professor (Assistant) at Ramapo College
Natalie Lemanski
- PhD
- Professor (Assistant) at Ramapo College
About
22
Publications
2,146
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168
Citations
Introduction
Natalie Lemanski is an evolutionary theorist using mathematical modeling, along with field experiments, to explore fundamental questions about the evolution of social behavior, such as how resource allocation within groups influences fitness and how ecological context shapes collective behavior and the evolution of social organization. She examines these questions in various systems with a particular focus on social insects such as honey bees.
Current institution
Education
September 2011 - May 2016
September 2006 - May 2010
Publications
Publications (22)
Aim
Habitat conversion is the number one threat to biodiversity. The loss of biodiversity due to habitat loss might be exacerbated if species are harmed by fragmentation per se—the breaking apart of natural habitat that remains (hereafter fragmentation ). However, the evidence that species are harmed by habitat fragmentation is mixed. Studies at th...
The current biodiversity crisis underscores the need to understand how biodiversity loss affects ecosystem function in real-world ecosystems. At any one place and time, a few highly abundant species often provide the majority of function, suggesting that function could be maintained with relatively little biodiversity. However, biodiversity may be...
Social behavior can have a major impact on the dynamics of infectious disease outbreaks. For animals that live in dense social groups, such as the eusocial insects, pathogens pose an especially large risk because frequent contacts among individuals can allow rapid spread within colonies. While there has been a large body of work examining adaptatio...
The trade-off between exploiting known resources and exploring for new ones is a complex decision-making challenge, particularly when resource patches are variable in quality and heterogeneously distributed in the landscape. Social insect colonies navigate this challenge, in the absence of centralized control, by allocating different individuals to...
Background
Honeybees have extraordinary phenotypic plasticity in their senescence rate, making them a fascinating model system for the evolution of aging. Seasonal variation in senescence and extrinsic mortality results in a tenfold increase in worker life expectancy in winter as compared to summer. To understand the evolution of this remarkable pa...
Significance
Variation in individual cognition affects how animals learn about and communicate information to others. We provide evidence that differences in how individual honey bees learn influences the collective foraging dynamics of a colony. By creating colonies of distinct learning phenotypes, we evaluated how bees make foraging choices in th...
Emerging mosquito-borne viruses like Zika, dengue, and chikungunya pose a major threat to public health, especially in low-income regions of Central and South America, southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. Outbreaks of these diseases are likely to have long-term social and economic consequences due to Zika-induced congenital microcephaly and other com...
Background: Honeybees have extraordinary phenotypic plasticity in their senescence rate, making them a fascinating model system for the evolution of aging. Seasonal variation in senescence and extrinsic mortality results in a tenfold increase in worker life expectancy in winter as compared to summer. To understand the evolution of this remarkable p...
Background: Honeybees have extraordinary phenotypic plasticity in their senescence rate, making them a fascinating model system for the evolution of aging. Seasonal variation in senescence and extrinsic mortality results in a tenfold increase in worker life expectancy in winter as compared to summer. To understand the evolution of this remarkable p...
Background: Honeybees have extraordinary phenotypic plasticity in their senescence rate, making them a fascinating model system for the evolution of aging. Seasonal variation in senescence and extrinsic mortality results in a tenfold increase in worker life expectancy in winter as compared to summer. To understand the evolution of this remarkable p...
The emergence of collective behavior from local interactions is a widespread phenomenon in social groups. Previous models of collective behavior have largely overlooked the impact of variation among individuals within the group on collective dynamics. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) provide an excellent model system for exploring the role of individual...
Background
Emerging mosquito-borne viruses like Zika, dengue, and chikungunya pose a major threat to public health, especially in low-income regions of Central and South America, southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. Outbreaks of these diseases are likely to have long-term social and economic consequences due to Zika-induced congenital microcephaly an...
The trade-off between exploiting known resources and exploring for new ones is a complex decision-making challenge, particularly when resource patches are variable in quality and heterogeneously distributed in the landscape. Social insect colonies navigate this challenge, in the absence of centralized control, by allocating different individuals to...
Variation in cognition can influence how individuals respond to and communicate about their environment, which may scale to shape how a collective solves a cognitive task. However, few empirical examples of variation in collective cognition emerges from variation in individual cognition exist. Here, we show that interactions among individuals that...
We discuss a Red Team-Blue Team (RT-BT) study conducted to examine the formation and efficacy of social networks in self-organizing, ad hoc , or crowd-sourced intelligence and counter-intelligence operations in grassroots, improvised communities. Student volunteers were sorted into two teams: one team (Blue) was asked to find puzzle pieces using cl...
One evolutionary view of aging, the disposable soma theory, suggests that an organism’s rate of senescence depends on the amount of energy invested in somatic maintenance. Since organisms have limited energy to allocate among growth, maintenance, and reproduction, the optimal amount of energy to invest in maintenance is influenced by the probabilit...
Honeybees are an excellent model system for examining how trade-offs shape reproductive timing in organisms with seasonal environments. Honeybee colonies reproduce two ways: producing swarms comprising a queen and thousands of workers or producing males (drones). There is an energetic trade-off between producing workers, which contribute to colony...
Honeybees are an ideal model system for understanding the evolutionary basis of aging because of
their extraordinary ability to adjust the aging process of workers according to colony needs. The
lifespans of workers change according to the seasonal pattern of colony activity; while summer
workers live only two to three weeks, winter workers may liv...
https://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/10083
One of the most potent EDCs in the environment is 17-ethynylestradiol (EE 2), the hormone in most birth control pills. EE 2 is released into the ecosystem through human wastewater, affecting the environment and its inhabitants. Fish both live and reproduce in these affected ecosystems, which may make them...
