The goal is to understand the evolution of altruism in the animal world (in particular the basis of the theory of kin selection) and the balance between altruistic and selfish behaviour which, from an evolutionary perspective, determines the emergence and functioning of social insect societies.
[3] Her contribution to our understanding of conflict resolution in the social insects combines multiple approaches: by bringing together behavioural experiments, the analysis of chemical recognition cues, and genetic methods, Sundström's work has provided numerous new insights into the complex dynamics of the ant colony.
[3] For example, she demonstrated that the number of times an ant queen has mated changes the social conditions in the colony, resulting in worker manipulation of the sex ratio.
This work is founded on a long-term dataset she has collected by studying a population of the wood ant Formica exsecta in an archipelago near the Tvärminne zoological station in southern Finland since 1994.
[11] She is a member of the editorial boards of several international journals including Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology,[14] Entomologia[15] and Insectes Sociaux[16] and a former member of the editorial boards of Evolution, Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences and Behavioral Ecology.