As Ina Anreiter and her colleagues observed their test subjects, they witnessed a distinct contrast in the creatures' foraging behaviour. Members of one group kept to the relative safety of the water's edge despite the absence of food there. But members of another group ventured from the water into open territory where their risky, roaming behaviour was rewarded with the discovery of food.
That the animals hunting for food were fruit flies didn't make the scenario any less fascinating to Anreiter. Nor that the experiment was being conducted in an 18-centimetre Plexiglas dish, the "prey" were tiny drops of sugar-solution near the centre of the dish, and the water was a ring around the outer edge to keep the flies from crawling out.
Anreiter is a behavioural geneticist and postdoctoral researcher in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology in the University of Toronto's Faculty of Arts & Science. "In my research," she says, "I'm trying to understand where, at a molecular and genetic level, individual differences in behaviour like foraging for food come from.
"It's more than nature versus nurture. The behaviour of individuals is part genetic and part environment - but it's also how those two factors interact."
For this work, Anreiter has won a prestigious Schmidt Fellowship, a program of Schmidt Futures in partnership with the Rhodes Trust. The fellowship comes with a stipend of $100,000 and is designed to support exceptional, early-career researchers taking their work in a new direction.
Anreiter is one of 20 recipients who were honoured at an event in New York City earlier this year. "Our mission at Schmidt Futures is to bet early on talented people who hold the promise of making the world a better place," said Eric Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Futures and former CEO of Google.
