Alex studies the evolution of social behaviour in animals – the ways single individuals come together to form stable social groups, and the behavioural, cognitive, and neuroanatomical mechanisms that have evolved to facilitate group living.
His research program encompasses traditional field behavioural ecology, computational ethology, physics of social behaviour, neurobiology, and most importantly evolutionary theory, aiming to understand both the mechanisms and the outcomes of social behaivour across species, with a focus on cichlid fishes and social spiders. His research is primarily field-focused, attempting to understand animal behaviour in the places it has evolved; Lake Tanganyika, the Mediterranean Sea, Coral Reefs in the Caribbean and Red Sea, as well as Central American rainforests