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Research Interests
My research interests include evolutionary, functional, and behavioral ecology, with applications to conservation and environmental issues. I use Lepidoptera as a test system to explore how environmental variation affects life history traits, population structure and dynamics, and species interactions over ecological and evolutionary time.
Environments vary on multiple spatial and temporal scales. Additionally, both the abiotic and biotic components of the environment may be variable, for example in cases of species’ invasions.
Organisms and populations may respond to environmental variation in ecological and/or evolutionary time. To understand these responses, I am currently pursuing projects within three broad areas:
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The physiological, ecological and evolutionary dynamics of resource allocation. Allocation of resources is the crucial step connecting foraging and life history traits such as reproduction, survival, storage and growth. As an additional complication in Lepidoptera, females use male nuptial gifts (spermatophores) for maintenance and egg production, linking the allocation budgets of the two sexes. Changes in resource allocation in response to environmental variation thus affect the evolution of life history strategies and mating systems. These in turn determine population dynamics and limits to a species’ range through effects on individual fitness.
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Heliconius charitonia |
- The effects of spatial environmental heterogeneity on population structure and dynamics through time. Spatial heterogeneity affects patterns of habitat use, individual fitness and population dynamics.
- Invasion dynamics. I am pursuing two projects here. The first project focuses on the ecological and evolutionary response of native species to introduced species. Non-native species invading a local community can intrude into co-evolved interactions among native species, sometimes disrupting those relationships. I am using the native butterfly/ non-native host system of Pieris napi / Thlaspi arvense to explore the ecological and evolutionary impacts of such events. Female P. napi recognize T. arvense as a potential larval host and oviposit on it; however, resulting larvae cannot develop on the plant. Oviposition preference is affected by both environmental and sex-linked genetic factors. The second project is a case study exploring the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of an introduced butterfly population, which stayed at low numbers for twenty-five generations after invasion, then expanded rapidly in a short time.
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Heliconius cydno |
My current research in these areas is empirical, with some modeling to guide
conceptual development. The empirical work uses butterflies as a model system, and is currently carried out in central California and in the mountains of central Colorado at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, although I have also worked previously in the Neotropics and in far northern Norway.
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