Dr Nick Royle

About me:

I am a behavioural and evolutionary ecologist and conservation biologist with wide-ranging interests centred on how organisms, particularly beetles, respond and adapt to changes in the environments they experience.

I am particularly interested in parental care, sexual selection, mating systems, reproductive conflicts of interest, behavioural plasticity, social behaviour and evolution, life-history evolution and conservation. My work involves both invertebrate and vertebrate systems in the field and in the lab. Most of my current research involves using beetles, including Nicrophorus vespilloides burying beetles, Carabus intricatus, the blue ground beetle, and various species of dung beetle. But I have extensive experience working on vertebrates too, especially birds.

I am also the Director of Postgraduate Research for the 100+ PGR students in the Centre for Ecology & Conservation.

Google Scholar Researchgate Orcid The Evolution of Parental Care book Twitter

Interests:

My behavioural/evolutionary research centres on addressing how organisms adapt to changes in their environment (social and/or non-social), with a particular focus on (plasticity) in parental care and sexual selection, within-family conflicts over parental investment and the co-evolutionary relationship between mating behaviours and parental care. In addition I work more broadly on the ecology, conservation and management of various organisms, primarily beetles. In addition to other ecologists I collaborate with microbiologists, ecotoxicologists, theoreticians and conservation professionals, among others, in my research.

I mostly use Nicrophorus vespilloides burying beetles in the lab or the field to address the questions that I am interested in, but also work on other species including blue ground beetles Carabus intricatus, various species of dung beetles and birds, such as blue tits Cyanistes caeruleus and canada geese Branta canadensis.

Qualifications:

1998 PhD Zoology (University of Durham)
1993 BSc Ecology (University of Edinburgh)

Career:

2022-present Associate Professor, University of Exeter

2012-2022 Senior Lecturer, University of Exeter

2008-2012 Lecturer, University of Exeter

2007-2008 NERC postdoctoral fellowship, University of Exeter

2005-2006 NERC postdoctoral fellowship, University of Glasgow

2002-2005 PDRA, University of Glasgow

1998-2001 PDRA, Lancaster University