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Research Synopsis:
To persist, organisms must survive and reproduce despite fluctuating environmental conditions. Many organisms utilize conditional strategies that involve phenotypic changes based on environmental conditions.
Inducible defenses that increase survival probability in the presence of a predator/herbivore have evolved in many taxa in response to variation in risk associated with the type and abundance of predators and costs associated with the expression of an inducible defense. In animals, inducible defenses function to increase survival in the presence of a predator, but frequently incur a cost of slower growth or decreased reproduction compared with the “no-predator” phenotype.
In addition to variation in the predator environment, sexually reproducing organisms concurrently face variation in mate availability. Many organisms have evolved conditional mating strategies that permit self-fertilization when mates are limited or undesirable and cross-fertilization when mates are available, but face gamete discounting, inbreeding depression, or decreased-gene-transfer costs of outcrossing if the wrong mating strategy is employed.
Responding to variation in predation risk and mate availability frequently involves plastic adjustment of the same life-history traits that affect the survival-reproduction trade-off that is central in life-history evolution (e.g., age and size at first reproduction).
While there has been a great deal of empirical and theoretical work on predator-induced phenotypic plasticity and mating-system plasticity, these two fields have been considered largely in isolation. To understand how organisms integrate their performance in the face of multiple challenges, we need to integrate these two fields of research and examine phenotypic plasticity from both a survival (predator-induced) and reproductive (mating-system) perspective.
Hence, I am interested in studying the reciprocal effects of plasticity in defensive and mating-system phenotypes and their population-level implications. I am studying this in the simultaneously hermaphroditic freshwater snail Physa acuta.
Background Information:
I received my B.S. in biology from Duquesne University in May 2003 and began graduate work towards a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Pittsburgh in the fall of 2003. In February-March 2004 I attended a field course conducted by the Organization for Tropical Studies in Costa Rica that was called "Tropical biology: an ecological approach".
Other important links:
University of Pittsburgh: Department of Biological Sciences
Duquesne University: Department of Biological Sciences
Robert T. Dillon on Physa acuta
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