Professor Michael Cant

About me:

I am an evolutionary biologist interested in how cooperation and conflict shape the lives and behaviour of animals that live in closely knit family groups. I use a combination of theory and testing to try to uncover general principles about why social behaviour - such as aggression and altruism - varies so much between individuals within groups, and between species, and how different types of animal society, including human societies, evolved.

One of my main study animals is the banded mongoose, a highly social species that lives in groups of about twenty adults plus offspring, and occurs across much of East and southern Africa. I started a long-term study of wild banded mongooses in Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda, for my PhD research, and we have studied the population continuously since then (see our project website here). Together with Francis Mwanguhya and his field team, we follow numerous groups of mongooses, tracking individual behaviour and life history from birth to death, measuring growth and development, reproductive success, patterns of cooperation and conflict, physiology and aging processes. I have used this system to investigate the evolution of cooperation, warfare, reproductive competition, collective action, transgenerational effects, and the cognitive mechansisms that make cooperation possible.

I work on other cooperative animals too. With Faye Thompson I study intergroup conflict in dampwood termites, using a laboratory population of around 700 colonies that we founded in 2018; with Darren Croft I work on a long-term dataset of resident killer whales in the northeast Pacific, and with Jeremy Field I study social behaviour in a population of paper wasps in southern Spain. My main collaborator on theory is Rufus Johnstone at the University of Cambridge. We have worked together for many years to develop new theory to understand the evolution of social behaviour and animal societies. 

Over the years I have been fortunate to win continuous funding for my research, including ERC Advanced and Consolidator Grants and a series of grants from NERC, the Royal Society, the German Science Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust. I have been awarded the Humboldt Research Award and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. From 2020 to 2022 I was based in Germany where I benefitted from the opportunity to work with outstanding colleages at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and the German Primate Center at Goettingen University.

I  currently supervise a dynamic group of postdocs and graduate students working on cooperation, intergroup conflict, collective behaviour, and social development. I am a member of the Behaviour research group, and the Human Biological and Cultural Evolution Group. For publications, videos and further information on my research see my group website here.

Book: The Evolution of Social Behaviour by Michael Taborsky, Michael Cant, and Jan Komdeur. Cambridge University Press

Media: March 2026. See my talk The Evolution of Group Identity at the Individualisation Symposium in Bielefeld, Germany. 2021. Together with Patrick Green I gave a joint Long Term Animal Research Seminar on warfare, mongooses, and group adaptation. 2019. Watch my talk about 'Kinship Dynamics and the Evolution of Social Life Histories' at the Zoo and Wildlife Research Symposium, Berln Oct 2019 (starts 1h:16). Listen to my contributions on the evolution of menopause on Radio 4's The Human Hive; or to my audio diary from Uganda on NERC's Planet Earth website (starts 2:45). 

Career

2024 ERC Advanced Grant
2022 Humboldt Research Award, Germany
2021 Leverhulme International Fellowship, University of Goettingen, Germany
2020 Wiko Fellowship, Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, Germany
2015 Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award
2013 ERC Consolidator Grant

2013 Professor of Evolutionary Biology
2011 Associate Professor
2007 Royal Society University Research Fellow, Centre for Ecology and Conservation, University of Exeter, Penryn Campus
2003 Royal Society University Research Fellow, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge
2001 Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Research Fellow. Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University, New York, USA
1999 Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Biology, University College London