About the Starks Lab
The Starks Lab is a behavioral ecology research group in the Department of Biology at Tufts University. We study how organisms — individually and collectively — detect threats and coordinate responses under environmental stress.
Our primary systems are honey bees, paper wasps, and ants, though the questions we ask extend well beyond any single taxon. The lab has a long-standing interest in the evolutionary logic of biological responses: why symptoms take the forms they do, how recognition systems evolve, and what collective behavior reveals about the strengths and limits of natural selection.