Andrew Bourke's Website
Welcome to my website
This is my personal website - mainly about research but also including some other interests; you can find my UEA webpages here.
NEWS
BUMBLE BEE REARING PROTOCOL: The group has prepared, as a community resource, a protocol on rearing research colonies of the bumble bee Bombus terrestris.
If interested, please find it on the Resources page.
UNUSUAL GASTROPOD FOSSIL FROM THE UK CHALK: As well as conducting research, I enjoy pursuing interests in all kinds of natural history, including bird watching, observing and recording insects (see here), rock-pooling, appreciating wild flowers and fossil collecting. We are lucky to have, nearby on the Norfolk coast, several sites that are well known for their Cretaceous (Chalk) and/or Pleistocene fossils (e.g. see here, here and here). While on a family fossil hunt on the beach at Overstrand (north-east Norfolk) a couple of years ago, one of my sons found a large gastropod preserved as an internal mould in Chalk (see left). The fossil turned out to be, unusually for the UK, a large Pleurotomariid from the Lower Maastrichtian stage of the Chalk (late Cretaceous). With the kind help of palaeontology and earth sciences professionals, including UEA colleagues Julian Andrews and Alina Marca of the School of Environmental Sciences, we recently published a short note about this find in Bulletin of the Geological Society of Norfolk.
For full details, see our note: Bourke WJ, Marca A, Andrews JE, Bourke AFG (2020) Scientific note on a large gastropod (Pleurotomariidae) from Upper Cretaceous Chalk at Overstrand, Norfolk, UK. Bulletin of the Geological Society of Norfolk 70: 67-71; available from the Geological Society of Norfolk here.
CONFLICT OVER RESOURCE INHERITANCE: In a paper in American Naturalist, we develop a model of queen-worker conflict over nest inheritance and test it in the bumble bee Bombus terrestris. As the model predicts, we show that workers harass queens with simulated fecundity loss and that aggressive workers are more likely to become egg-layers. This is consistent with workers monitoring queen fecundity to weigh up the relative benefits of reproducing in the nest after the queen's death versus continuing to keep the queen alive as a source of siblings. These findings provide new support for kin-selected conflict over resource inheritance being a key process in social animals.
The paper is: Almond EJ, Huggins TJ, Crowther LP, Parker JD, Bourke AFG (2019) Queen longevity and fecundity affect conflict with workers over resource inheritance in a social insect. American Naturalist 193: 256-266.
View paper View further details