Caltech Together: Silicon Valley
November 20, 2025 at 5:30 pm — 7:00 pm
Free
Rove beetles show extreme evolution, changing from free-living predators to imposters that infiltrate ant societies. This exceptional symbiotic transition helps us understand how ecological relationships are formed. Through dramatic shifts in their social behavior and chemical communication, different species interact and develop intimate relationships. Our speaker, Professor Joe Parker, was just named a MacArthur Fellow.
Following the webinar, join us for a post-event social via Zoom, where you’ll have the opportunity to mingle with fellow alumni and speak with the presenter. If you would like our alumni or professors to share with us their work/interests during a future event, please let me know.
We look forward to seeing you!
Peter Tong
“The Rove Beetle’s Story: The Evolution of Interspecies Relationships”
By Joe Parker
The biosphere is a network of interacting species, connecting organisms across all scales, from microbes to mammals. Our knowledge of the mechanisms behind these relationships and the evolutionary forces that shape them is incomplete. In this lecture, I will describe how my lab has pioneered the study of rove beetles as a group of related species to break open basic problems in how organisms interact and where these interactions come from.
Most of the 66,000 rove beetle species are free-living predators. But, from this original lifestyle, hundreds of their relatives have changed into symbiotic organisms that specialize in living as imposters within the complex societies of ants. The shift from free-living to symbiotic is a paradigm of extreme evolution, involving major changes in social behavior and chemical communication that allow rove beetles to blend into the social life of their host colonies.
The widespread evolution of this symbiosis, combined with the tractability of studying both free-living and symbiotic rove beetles, makes for a powerful system to understand how and why new ecological relationships emerge during evolution.
Joe will discuss how his lab’s work is creating an integrated picture of how species recognize and interact, illuminating the conditions leading to these interactions, and the forces shaping their evolution into dependent and highly intimate relationships.
About the Speaker
Joe is an evolutionary biologist who has pioneered the study of rove beetles to investigate the evolution of symbiosis and species interactions. Originally from Swansea, Wales, he received a BS from Imperial College London and a PhD from the University of Cambridge/MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. Currently, he is a Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech, where he is the director of Caltech’s Center for Evolutionary Science. He is also a research associate in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2024.
Our Alumni Volunteers
The following alumni work together to serve you: Avni Gandhi, Dave Adler, Jane Frommer, Mike Klein, Susan Huynh, and Peter Tong.