Dr Delphine De Moor

About me:

I am a behavioural ecologist studying the evolution of social relationships. Animals in a wide variety of species form a few close bonds, akin to friendships, with some of their group members. With my research, I aim to understand how forming social bonds impacts individual survival and reproduction, and what drives partner choice in the formation of these bonds.

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher with Lauren Brent at the Center for Research in Animal Behaviour (CRAB) of the University of Exeter (UK). I am part of FriendOrigins, an ERC Consolidator funded project (864461), aimed at understanding the evolutionary origins of friendship. I take a cross-species comparative approach to test how socio-ecological factors shape social relationships. Together with Julie Duboscq, Christof Neumann, Julia Ostner and Oliver Schülke, we are building a collaborative dataset with decades of data on over ten species of macaques. Studying social relationships in these species, with varying social systems and ecological pressures and known phylogenetic relationships, we can explicitly address the question of which types of social connectedness are adaptive, and why.

Social bonds, or friendships, allow individuals to live healthier, longer lives, yet the reason why these relationships are beneficial remains unclear. To better understand the evolutionary origin of social relationships, and to uncover the mechanisms linking sociality to fitness benefits, I take a cross-species comparative approach across all well-studied macaque species. Macaques show the same basic patterns of social organisation, but display broad interspecific variation in their social style. By studying these differences in sociality using social network analysis, and linking them to socio-ecological factors such as intra-group relatedness and competition, we can test which type(s) of social connectedness are adaptive, and why.

This project is part of the FriendOrigins project (ERC funded, 864461), and uses the collaborative dataset MacaqueNet, built and maintained by me, Lauren Brent, Julie Duboscq, Christof Neumann, Julia Ostner and Oliver Schülke.

2016-2020: PhD in Behavioral Ecology, University of Göttingen
2014-2015: Master of Sciene, Biology, Ghent University & Utrecht University
2010-2013: Bachelor of Science, Biology, Ghent University