Dr David Collins

David loves teaching and has spent many years teaching University students at all stages of education. He especially likes teaching field ecology, and prior to moving to the University of Suffolk, he helped run residential field courses to Ireland, Norfolk, and Eswatini (formally Swaziland, in Southern Africa). He has also been the principal module organiser for a Masters level Statistics and computational modelling module taught using R. For this course, his aim was to make these statistics penetrable for students who were less confident in their analytical skills.

In addition, he has given lectures and run workshops on the following topics covering education levels 3 through 7:

Foundation year biology
Biodiversity
Biology skills
Behavioural Ecology
Evolutionary Biology
Fieldwork in temperate and tropical zones
Parasites and Pathogen Ecology
Evolution in Health and Disease
Social Evolution
Statistics and coding using R

David's research has primarily been on ageing processes in insects using the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster and the bumble bee, Bombus terrestris as model species.

Ageing theory predicts (and most solitary species show) a negative relationship between fecundity and longevity because reproduction is generally thought to be costly. However, a somewhat puzzling challenge is that many social insects, including most bumble bees, exhibit positive relationships between fecundity and longevity which implies that reproduction is not costly for these species. In a recent experiment, David experimentally increased the fecundity of bumble bee queens, shortening their normally long lives considerably. This experiment showed that reproduction is costly in social insects after all, but that the costs are often hidden. In addition, he manipulated the nutritional content of diets of Drosophila larvae and showed that some manipulations changed the direction of the fecundity-longevity relationship from negative to positive. These findings suggested a possible mechanism for why social insects appear to have a positive fecundity-longevity relationship. They suggest that the relationship is caused by brood care and nutrition quality differences provided to individual larvae in social insect colonies.

Beyond these exciting topics, David also has research interests in the genetics of caste determination in social insects, and on the role of RNA interference in sexual conflict.

Academic societies including:
Bees, Wasps and Ants Recording Society (BWARS)
British Trust for Ornithology (BTO)
European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB)
International Union for the Study of Social Insects (IUSSI)

Conservation societies including
Bumblebee Conservation Trust
Butterfly Conservation
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
World Wildlife Fund