Dr William Foster

I am interested in the behaviour and ecology of insects and in particular in how natural selection has moulded the behaviour of individual insects to their own specific ecology. My main current research interests are in the ecology of insects from oil palm plantations in South East Asia and in the evolution of social behaviour in digger wasps.

I am part of the Insect Ecology group, run by Dr Edgar Turner. We are carrying out a collaborative project with the oil palm industry, the BEFTA Project, which experimentally manipulates the understory habitat complexity within plantations to test its effect on a wide range of taxa and ecosystem processes. The aim of this work is to establish management practices that can be employed to enhance both biodiversity and important ecosystem functions, such as pest control, in tropical agricultural landscapes.

My initial research was on the biology of saltmarsh and marine insects, but in more recent years I have become fascinated by the origins of social behaviour in insects, in particular in aphids, paper wasps, hover wasps, and the solitary sphecid wasps.

Publications

Field, J.P., Savill, C., and Foster, W.A. (2025). Memory and the scheduling of parental care in an insect population in the wild. Current Biology 35: 2740-2745

Uematsu, K., Yang, M.M. and Foster, W.A. (2025). The kin-selected context of duelling in horned aphids: cooperation or conflict? Behavioral Ecology 36: araf076

Field, J.P., Accleton, C. and Foster, W.A. (2018). Crozier’s effect and the acceptance of intraspecific brood parasites. Current Biology 28: 3267-3272

Foster, W.A., Snaddon, J.L., Turner, E.C., Fayle, T.M., Cockerill, T.D., Ellwood, M.D.F., Broad, G.R., Chung, Y.C., Eggleton, P., Vun Khen, C., and Yusah, K.M. (2011). Establishing the evidence base for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem function in the oil palm landscapes of South East Asia. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 366: 3277-3291

Turner, E.C. and Foster, W.A. (2009). The impact of forest conversion to oil palm on arthropod abundance and biomass in Sabah, Malaysia. Journal of Tropical Ecology 25: 23-30

Ellwood, M.D.F. and Foster, W.A. (2004). Doubling the estimate of invertebrate biomass in a rainforest canopy. Nature 428: 549-551

Stern, D.L. and Foster, W.A. (1996). The evolution of soldiers in aphids. Biological Reviews 71: 27-79

Foster, W.A. and Benton, T.J. (1992). Sex ratio, local mate competition and mating behaviour in the aphid Pemphigus spyrothecae. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 90: 297-307

Treherne, J.E. and Foster W.A. (1981). Group transmission of predator avoidance behaviour in a marine insect: the Trafalgar Effect. Animal Behaviour 29: 911-917

Foster, W.A. and Treherne, J.E. (1981). Evidence for the dilution effect in the selfish herd from fish predation on a marine insect. Nature 293: 466-467