Research Summary
Seasonality makes life difficult. Living in Florida, seasonality means I hide inside of an air conditioned building all summer. Living in Washtington state, I'd be be similarly holed up next to the radiator during the winter. Animals, plants, bacteria, and just about any other form of life face similar, if a bit more extreme seasonal hardships. Resources and mates are often available for only a few months of the year, while harsh conditions can persist for much longer. Evolved strategies for dealing with these hardships are highly diverse, incorporating elements of life cycle timing, phenotypic plasticity, and general stress resistance. My goal is to understand both the selective factors giving rise to this diversity and the physiological and genetic underpinnings of seasonal adaptations. Insects provide the ideal model system, exhibiting an extraordinary diversity of strategies for dealing with the challenges of seasonality.
Many of the questions that I address center on insect diapause. Like many types of organisms, insects have evolved strategies to avoid environmental hardships such as harsh, cold winters at higher latitudes or altitudes. Diapause is a dormant, metabolically depressed state that may be obligate or environmentally cued. My research currently focuses on two major aspects of diapause biology:
- Ecological and evolutionary physiology of insect dormancy.
- Thermal ecology and seasonal adaptation along climatic gradients
I am also interested in the evolution of physiological plasticity, especially in fluctuating environments. My work in this area includes the quatitative genetics and evolution of thermal reaction norms in thermally variable environments and across geographic clines in temeprature.