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Karlo Hock Highlights Individual Behaviors in Social Networks

What are the evolutionary settings and selection pressures that gave rise to the behaviors we see today? Unlike the famous example of horse's foot, we lack fossilized evidence for the evolution of social behavior. That is why modeling is key to the understanding of social behavior, says Karlo Hock, a DEENR Research Associate.

photo of crayfish Karlo began work on the evolution of behavior during his doctoral studies at Bowling Green State University, when he studied crayfish dominance hierarchies. Crayfish, unlike ants or honeybees, do not really work together; they mostly fight when they meet one another. However, their populations still feature organization rules that help the crayfish resolve future conflicts. Using models of crayfish hierarchies, Karlo investigated how the behaviors of individual crayfish gave rise to such organization, and what benefits the structuring of a group provided to individual animals.

After completing his Ph.D., Karlo returned to his native Croatia where he held a position as research scientist at the Rudjer Boskovic Institute. He then responded to Dr. Nina Fefferman's international search for a research associate and was identified as the most highly qualified candidate for the position, with its unique requirements for a behavioral ecologist interested in modeling the emergent properties of social systems.

At Rutgers, Karlo works with Professor Fefferman to apply dynamic social networks to biology. In a nutshell, social network analysis mathematically explains the relationships among actors. The actors may be any of a rich variety such as friends, diseases, websites, or locations. The Fefferman lab models the connections among these actors to describe types of group organization and to predict organizational-level successes of groups or populations. Karlo lends a critical perspective to this work, studying individuals embedded within interacting, organized groups. Drawing upon his background on observing crayfish and behaviors of other animals, Karlo is interested in how individual actors and the choices they make play into the global organizational structures, and how those individuals benefit or are hurt by the organizational structure. An example of how this works is the organization of our own social networks and businesses. For example, employees will benefit from having a good job and the company as a whole will benefit from having happy and productive workers, but it might not be immediately obvious what additional benefits, such as added productivity from belonging to a good team or some other special rewards, employees will get from working for a good company. “It is even harder to predict Photo of Karlo at the Oceanhow this works in animal social groups, which is what makes this research exciting,” adds Karlo. Moreover, this network concept applies at levels of biological organization, from molecules and cells to the interactions among populations and species.

Karlo shares his expertise in animal behavior by teaching several courses, including a graduate course in behavioral ecology. This Fall semester he is teaching Animal Behavior to an enthusiastic group of Rutgers undergraduates. As Karlo noted, “Teaching animal behavior is a lot of fun. Talking about how great science can be made from observing birds that pluck worms off of conveyor belts or ants that grow their own food is every bit as enjoyable as it sounds.” Karlo is also publishing the results of his work from here and Croatia, so look for those publications soon. You can meet up with Karlo and talk behavioral ecology sometime; in addition to building a connection in the social network, surely you will find it rewarding.