Professor Guillaume Chomicki, a researcher in the Department of Biosciences, has been named a recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize, Mirage News reports. The award from the Leverhulme Trust goes to scholars whose work has already drawn attention beyond their own field and who are seen as having unusually strong prospects ahead. For Chomicki, the recognition centres on his studies of how partnerships between species take shape, endure and come apart.
Why it matters
The prize highlights a line of research that treats cooperation between species as something that can be measured and tracked over time, rather than simply described. Chomicki's subject is why organisms as different as insects and plants enter into relationships at all, and what pushes those relationships to shift or collapse.
That question has a practical edge. If researchers can identify which kinds of partnership are fragile and which hold, they gain a way to think about how mutual dependencies form in nature and how they fail. The Leverhulme Trust's decision to back the work also signals confidence that the next phase of the research could open new ground.
A natural laboratory for cooperation
Much of Chomicki's attention goes to the Hydnophytinae, a grouping of roughly 100 plants that make their home on the limbs of rainforest trees in Australasia. These plants host ants, and the insects repay the arrangement by supplying the plant with their waste and with the material they carry back to it.
The group is unusually varied in how it handles these guests. Certain plants work with just one dedicated ant species. Others tolerate a wide range of ant species. Still others have dropped ants entirely. According to Mirage News, the group has produced more instances of losing the ant partnership, relative to its size, than any other known plant lineage — a distinction that led Chomicki to describe it as a natural laboratory for cooperation.
His findings point to a clear pattern in which relationships survive. The arrangements that broke down were the permissive ones, where a plant accepted many kinds of ant. In every case of loss that he documented, the plant involved had been open to multiple ant species. The tightly specialised pairings, by contrast, did not come apart.
The ants that farm
Chomicki's most widely reported result came from fieldwork in Fiji. There he found that an ant called Philidris nagasau cultivates six species of Squamellaria plant. The insects place seeds into crevices in tree bark, tend the young plants with nutrients, defend them against animals that would eat them, and take food from them in return.
The arrangement has run long enough to reshape the ants themselves. Across roughly three million years of living this way, they have lost the capacity to construct nests of their own and now rely on the plants they raise for shelter. The work appeared in Nature Plants in 2016 and was described as the first documented instance of genuine plant agriculture carried out by a species other than humans. It drew coverage worldwide.
His research has continued along related lines. In 2024, working with an international team, he examined carnivorous pitcher plants and how they capture insects, showing how distinct biological changes can converge over evolutionary time to produce a new and complicated trait. The previous year, work published in Science demonstrated how Squamellaria plants in Fiji are able to keep up partnerships with several ant colonies that compete with one another.
The prize funding will support Chomicki in taking the ant-plant research into new territory, including an investigation of whether concealed participants — microbes among them — play a part in holding ants and plants together.
Watch for how the microbe question develops, since it could change how these partnerships are understood at the most basic level.
