University of Toronto Scarborough

LORD OF THE FLIES: Andrew Mason has won the Principal's Research Award and several other NSERC research grants this year. (Photo by Ken Jones.)

For Andrew Mason, scientific curiosity is at the heart of discovery.

The life sciences professor, who was recently named the recipient of the Principal’s Award for Research at the University of Toronto Scarborough, is fascinated by flies, crickets, katydids, and spiders. He is fuelled by a keen interest in observing unusual or strange behaviour and trying to learn why it is happening.

“I like to find a really interesting natural phenomenon and try to figure out why it happens,” says Mason. “Scientific curiosity is at the heart of research, and you have to pursue the things you wonder most about. People often don’t realize that -- although research has many applications -- the practical outcomes are not predictable at the beginning.”

A biologist with an interest in the nervous system as it relates to animal behaviour, Mason has also received several large grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to study complex signaling behaviour in insects, and the mechanism and function of complex sensory signals in flies. He and his postdoctoral student, Fernando Montealegre, recently won a National Geographic grant to travel to Panama and Colombia to obtain katydid samples and bring them back to his lab for study.

According to John Coleman, the Vice-Principal (Research and Graduate Studies), Mason is an exceptional recipient of these awards. “With highly-cited and innovative studies on the vibrational sensory systems of insects, even at this early stage of his career he has established an international reputation in his field,” Coleman noted.

As a child, Mason was fascinated by both animal behaviour and gadgets, and had a tendency to take things apart. These hobbies led to his interest in both the nervous system and observable behaviour. Mason’s research looks at sensory processes underlying communication and decision-making in insects, with the goal of understanding how the nervous system controls ongoing activity, and how these mechanisms affect or relate to behaviour. He works primarily with insects, which offer advantages as model systems for the study of general mechanisms.

One of his main projects is directional hearing in a species of parasitic flies that habitually park themselves on top of crickets. The females of this particular species, Ormia ochracea, use the crickets as a breeding ground on which they lay tiny larvae that grow into large maggots. In order to find the crickets, these flies must rely on a keen sense of hearing, a groundbreaking discovery that dispelled the notion that flies do not hear. The revelation that these parasites could detect the location of singing crickets using a unique set of eardrums located behind their heads took the zoological world by storm. Mason and his co-authors published their pioneering findings in Nature a few years ago, and despite the study’s technical nature, it was also featured in popular media venues such as the Discovery Channel, BBC World Service, CTV News, and Science News.

Mason began working with these parasitic flies when he was a research associate at Cornell University, collaborating with Cornell biologists and engineers at Binghamton University in New York state. Work on the directional hearing ability in these tiny flies has led to advances in acoustic technology, including a patent for a new microphone design with potential applications for hearing aids.

He and his postdoctoral students and collaborators are now examining the way flies process multiple sound sources and how they can zero in on or select a particular sound among many other competing sounds. 

Spiders are another area of fascination. He and postdoctoral student Damian Elias are examining different forms of communication (multimodal communication) in a diverse group of jumping spiders, comprising some 100 different species throughout North America. Jumping spiders do not live on webs, but instead wander around and have much better vision than spiders generally possess.

Their acute vision is important in all aspects of their behaviour, including navigation, prey capture and communication. Some species of jumping spiders exhibit a much more complex communication behaviour than is usual among spiders, involving both vision and vibration -- in order to attract females, they wave and shake their legs to make the web or the ground shake and vibrate.

“This research on jumping spiders is generating interest in both neuroscience and animal behaviour fields,” says Mason. “We are now studying two sensory systems, vision and vibration, and how they combine. We want to know how this complex signaling works in the nervous system and in the evolution of decision making.”

Although the demands on Mason’s time are numerous, especially as he continues to make a name for himself in biological circles, he says the ultimate stress buster is the research itself. “Teaching, research, and lab administration all make many diverse demands on a faculty member's time,” he says. “For me, the best antidote to the time constraints and stress is just getting down to set up an experiment and troubleshooting whatever problem we’re trying to solve.”