Low demographic variability in wild primate populations: fitness impacts of variation, covariation, and serial correlation in vital rates.

Bill Morris studies the population ecology of plants and insects (both herbivores and pollinators). Current projects include: the population dynamic consequences of constitutive and inducible resistance in plants, the maintenance of mutualistic interactions between flowering plants and nectar-robbing pollinators, the use of population-level attributes to detect biotic responses to ongoing environmental changes, and the use of mathematical models to assess viability of threatened and endangered populations. The common thread uniting these projects is that they combine field experiments and mathematical models to study population dynamics in natural and managed systems.

I have recently retired and am not taking on new students although I am continuing some research projects.  I am interested in understanding the evolution of sociality, social structure, and the patterns of competition, cooperation and social bonds in animal species, including humans. Most of my work has focused on social mammals: lions and chimpanzees. For the last twenty five years I have worked almost exclusively on the long term Gombe chimpanzee project. I have gathered the data from this study into an archive, currently housed at Duke, and I oversee the computerization of systematically collected daily data, incorporating this and related material into a relational database. I also advise on the ongoing field study at Gombe. Combined analysis of the long-term data and focused new data collection in the field enables study of a wide variety of questions. Current projects in my research group include studies of female social relationships and female settlement patterns. We also participate in collaborative work with colleagues at a number of other institutions on studies of life history, personality, and health, including studying the natural history of SIVcpz.

Research in the Alberts Lab investigates the evolution of social behavior, particularly in mammals, with a specific focus on the social behavior, demography, life history, and behavioral endocrinology of wild primates. Our main study system is the baboon population in Amboseli, Kenya, one of the longest-running studies of wild primates in the world, ongoing since 1971.