Professor Guillaume Chomicki from our Department of Biosciences has been awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize for his internationally recognised research in evolutionary biology.
The prizes, awarded by the Leverhulme Trust, recognise outstanding researchers whose work has already gained international recognition and whose future careers show exceptional promise.
Guillaume conducts world-leading research into how partnerships between species evolve, persist and break down.
He is particularly interested in why different species - such as insects and plants - form partnerships and what causes these relationships to change or break down.
Much of Guillaume’s work focuses on the Hydnophytinae, a group of around 100 plants that grow on the branches of rainforest trees across Australasia.
They form swollen, hollow stems divided into chambers where ant colonies live.
In return, the ants feed the plant with their waste and with the debris they carry home.
Some of these plants rely on a single specialist ant, others accept many kinds, and some have given up ants altogether.
Over roughly 10 million years, the partnership has been lost 12 separate times.
That is a higher rate for its size than any other known group, which makes it what Guillaume calls a ‘natural laboratory for cooperation’.
Guillaume’s work showed that the loose, open partnerships are the ones that fall apart.
Every loss began in plants that accepted many kinds of ant, while the specialised partnerships never collapsed.
Guillaume’s best-known discovery came in Fiji, where he found that the ant Philidris nagasau farms six species of Squamellaria plant.
The ants sow the seeds in cracks in tree bark, fertilise the seedlings, guard them from plant-eaters and harvest food from them.
Over the three million years of the partnership, the ants have lost the ability to build nests of their own and instead depend on their crop for a home.
Published in Nature Plants in 2016, it was the first known case of true plant agriculture by an animal other than humans, and it made headlines around the world.
In 2024, Guillaume and an international team studied carnivorous pitcher plants and their remarkable ability to capture insects.
Their research showed how separate biological changes can come together during evolution to create a new and complex feature.
The seven-year study featured on the Science journal’s front cover.
Last year, Guillaume’s research, also published in Science, showed how Fijian Squamellaria plants can maintain partnerships with several competing ant colonies.
The Philip Leverhulme Prize fund will help Guillaume take his ant-plant research in new directions, including exploring whether hidden partners such as microbes help bind ants and plants together.
"I'm absolutely delighted and honoured to receive the Prize. It recognises more than a decade of work, much of it in the rainforests of Fiji, and it belongs just as much to my team, my students and my many collaborators worldwide, and in particular in Fiji."
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