Timothy Schaerf
Location: Macleay Building, Room 253 | Email: | Phone: 02 9036 5216
Postdoctoral Fellow
I study a broad range of problems in collective animal behaviour with the aide of mathematical models. My primary research interest is in studying the collective decision making process of swarms of various species of honey bee as they search for a site to establish a new colony. My principal study species have been the common cavity nesting Apis mellifera and the red dwarf honey bee A. florea. During my time with the beelab, I have also studied brood comb construction by species of Australian stinglees bees (Tetragonula) and helped develop methods for determining rules of interaction in moving groups of eastern mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki).
Before joining the beelab I was a PhD student in applied mathematics at the University of Sydney. I studied the motion of large scale vortices, primarily using the efficient Contour-Advective Semi-Lagrangian (CASL) method. My web page from my time as a student still exists, and can be found here. Included on the page are links to animations of some simple vortex simulations performed by the CASL algorithm.
Publications
- T. M. Schaerf, M. R. Myerscough, J. C. Makinson and M. Beekman, Inaccurate and unverified information in decision making - a model for the nest site selection process of Apis florea, Animal Behaviour, in press, doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.07.034.
- K. Diwold, T. M. Schaerf, M. R. Myerscough, M. Middendorf and M. Beekman, Deciding on the wing: in-flight decision making and search space sampling in the red dwarf honeybee A. florea, Swarm Intelligence, 5, pp 121-141, 2011.
- J. C. Makinson, B. P. Oldroyd, T. M. Schaerf, W. Wattanachaiyingcharoen and M. Beekman, Moving home: nest-site selection in the red dwarf honeybee Apis florea, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 65, pp 945-958, 2011.
- C. Macaskill and T. M. Schaerf, Jupiter's Great Red Spot, Encyclopedia of Nonlinear Science (Alwyn Scott, Editor), pp 486-488, Taylor and Francis, 2005.
- T. M. Schaerf and C. Macaskill, Detecting contour crossings in countour dynamical and contour-advective semi-Lagrangian simulations, ANZIAM J., 45(E), pp C693-C712, 2004.