Roger Schürch

About

Roger Schürch is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Entomology at Virginia Tech, with a focus on behavioral ecology and social evolution, particularly in insects. His research emphasizes cooperative and communicative behaviors within insect societies, exploring how individuals, even closely related ones, display consistent behavioral differences, often referred to as personalities or behavioral types, in contexts of cooperation and communication. He investigates how complex systems like insect societies evolve to respond adaptively to rapidly changing environments, including social and climate changes, using empirical, quantitative, and theoretical approaches. Schürch's background includes a Ph.D. from the University of Bern, Switzerland, where he studied individual variation in life-history and behavioral types in the highly social cichlid Neolamprologus pulcher. His professional experience encompasses postdoctoral research at Ohio State University, the University of Neuchâtel, and the University of Sussex, as well as a position as a senior statistician at the University of Bern. Since 2017, he has been involved in research at Virginia Tech, studying behavioral, ecological, and evolutionary questions in insects along the social gradient from solitary to eusocial, with a particular interest in eusocial insects such as bees, wasps, ants, and termites. His work aims to better understand social evolution and cooperation in animal societies, which has ecological,…

Research topics

• Biology
• Ecology
• Geography
• Agronomy
• Toxicology
• Botany
• Physical therapy
• Agroforestry
• Medicine
• Internal medicine

Selected publications

• Effect of transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) on knee pain and physical function in patients with symptomatic knee osteoarthritis: the ETRELKA randomized clinical trial

  Osteoarthritis and Cartilage · 2021 · 47 citations

  DOI

• BOHEMIA: Broad One Health Endectocide-based Malaria Intervention in Africa—a phase III cluster-randomized, open-label, clinical trial to study the safety and efficacy of ivermectin mass drug administration to reduce malaria transmission in two African settings

  Trials · 2023-02-21 · 41 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: Residual malaria transmission is the result of adaptive mosquito behavior that allows malaria vectors to thrive and sustain transmission in the presence of good access to bed nets or insecticide residual spraying. These behaviors include crepuscular and outdoor feeding as well as intermittent feeding upon livestock. Ivermectin is a broadly used antiparasitic drug that kills mosquitoes feeding on a treated subject for a dose-dependent period. Mass drug administration with ivermectin h…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dancing bees evaluate central urban forage resources as superior to agricultural land

  Journal of Applied Ecology · 2021 · 39 citations

  Abstract Recent evidence suggests that flower‐rich areas within cities could play an important role in pollinator conservation, but direct comparison of floral resources within agricultural and urban areas has proved challenging to perform over large scales. Here we use the waggle dances of honeybees Apis mellifera L. to perform large‐scale landscape surveys at heavily urban or agricultural sites for a key pollinator of wild and crop plants. We analysed 2,827 dances that were performed by 20 col…

  DOI

• Do honey bee (Apis mellifera) foragers recruit their nestmates to native forbs in reconstructed prairie habitats?

  PLoS ONE · 2020 · 39 citations

  Honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies are valued for the pollination services that they provide. However, colony mortality has increased to unsustainable levels in some countries, including the United States. Landscape conversion to monocrop agriculture likely plays a role in this increased mortality by decreasing the food sources available to honey bees. Many land owners and organizations in the Upper Midwest region of the United States would like to restore/reconstruct native prairie habitats. W…

  DOI

• Honey Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae) Decrease Foraging But Not Recruitment After Neonicotinoid Exposure

  Journal of Insect Science · 2021 · 27 citations

  Honey bees (Linnaeus, Hymenoptera: Apidae) are widely used as commercial pollinators and commonly forage in agricultural and urban landscapes containing neonicotinoid-treated plants. Previous research has demonstrated that honey bees display adverse behavioral and cognitive effects after treatment with sublethal doses of neonicotinoids. In laboratory studies, honey bees simultaneously increase their proportional intake of neonicotinoid-treated solutions and decrease their total solution consumpt…

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Margaret J. Couvillon

  Virginia Tech

  40 shared

• Francis L. W. Ratnieks

  University of Sussex

  17 shared

• Bradley David Ohlinger

  Virginia Tech

  17 shared

• Mary R. Silliman

  12 shared

• Dik Heg

  University of Bern

  11 shared

• Taylor Steele

  11 shared

• Ash E. Samuelson

  Royal Holloway University of London

  8 shared

• Fardo Witsenburg

  University of Lausanne

  6 shared

Labs

• Roger Schürch LabPI

Education

• PhD, Behavioural Ecology

  Universität Bern

  2008

Similar researchers at Virginia Tech

• Igor Sharakhovh-37
• Maria Sharakhovah-33
• Sally Entrekinh-32