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Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
Differences in behavior and physiology can arise and change because of variation in life history strategies or differences in discrete polymorphisms. These differences can result from the indirect effects of predation, or responses to...
Understanding the evolution of cooperative behaviors is a major goal of evolutionary biology, but the majority of research in this field has focused on why helpers assist others. Helpers’ reproductive costs introduce a clear paradox to...
Species interactions can regulate a population’s density and therefore can act as a selective force on that population. Such evolutionary responses have the potential to feedback and change ecological interactions between species. For...
Clonality is the general term that encompasses all manner of pinching, splitting, budding, and fragmenting behaviors by which organisms divide their somatic body tissues into more or less independent units. It can be as straight forward...
Density, or the number of individuals per unit area, is known to have substantial effects on individual organisms and on populations. In particular, densities at small spatial scales often affect species interactions, e.g., predation and...
Early-life experience can influence behaviors that are important for survival and reproduction, two key elements of individual fitness. However, identifying a mechanism linking early-life experience to late-life behavior is a major...
Biological hard materials are a remarkable class of materials combining large volumes of mineral with minute organic components into often complex, hierarchical microstructural arrangements. These intricate microstructures offer ideal...
The North American gray treefrog complex (Hyla versicolor sensu lato), defined here as encompassing the diploid species Hyla chrysoscelis and Hyla avivoca, and the tetraploid Hyla versicolor, has long been used as a model system in a...
The Pine Barrens treefrog (Hyla andersonii) is restricted to three isolated (disjunct) regions in the eastern United States: New Jersey, North and South Carolina, and the Florida panhandle and southern Alabama. It is a seepage bog...
Next generation sequencing can rapidly analyze entire genomes in just hours. However, due to the nature of the sequencing process, errors may arise which limit the accuracy of the reads obtained. Luckily, modern sequencing technologies...
Spiny lobsters (Family Palinuridae) are large, diverse, and abundant marine crustaceans, which have conquered tropical, subtropical, and temperate coastal waters around the globe despite strong predation pressure. The mechanisms and...
Two species of ariid catfish, Ariopsis felis and Bagre marinus, were sampled at various sites along the northwest coast of Florida. Stomach contents of each species were analyzed in order to understand the trophic ecology of these two...
Understanding how environmental forces, genetic variation, and developmental process combine to mold adaptations remains a core challenge in evolutionary biology. Our research is answering this challenge. More specifically we focused on...
The study of adaptive molecular evolution in natural populations has been severely limited by the difficulty of linking genetic variation to phenotypic variation to fitness effects. Most studies connecting genotype, phenotype, and...
When the two sexes maximize their fitness in different ways, a sexual conflict emerges, in which traits favored in one sex are not favored in the other (Parker 1979, Arnqvist and Rowe 2005). Under interlocus sexual conflict, a type of...
A great challenge that biology faces is in integrating phenomena from different scales. On the micro scale of the spectrum, we can measure subcellular processes, like gene expression and regulation. On the macro scale, we can measure...
The ecological and evolutionary factors influencing whether hermaphrodites inbreed or outbreed via self-fertilization or outcrossing has long been a theoretical and empirical focus. Recent theory predicts that the conditions favoring the...
The therapeutic properties offered by venom-derived toxins have led to the development of many life-saving medications. As this medicinal library continues to grow, so does the need to fully understand these toxins and their potential...
The small golden ant Pheidole morrisi Forel is the most common ant of the Apalachicola National Forest, a typical longleaf pine flat-woods ecosystem and is found in pine forests across the eastern U.S. P. morrisi likely plays a...
Understanding the maintenance of phenotypic variation within populations has long been a puzzle in evolutionary biology. Many models ignore that fact that animals are not living alone; instead social factors have the potential to alter...
Despite their simple appearance sponges are extremely diverse and complicated in their interactions with other organisms, and they are extremely difficult to identify to species. Often sponges of the same genus or body shape have very...
Quantitative genetics is a powerful tool for predicting phenotypic evolution on a microevolutionary scale. This predictive power primarily comes from the Lande equation (Δz̅=Gβ), a multivariate expansion of the breeder's equation, where...
Stress is a ubiquitous aspect of everyday life. As such, there exists a great deal of variability in the individual response to stress, particularly as a functional cause of depression. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the...
Understanding the factors that influence a species' geographic range and the overlap between the ranges of distinct species remains a central question in both ecology and evolution. Here we investigate the influences of hybridization and...
Studying the relationships between plants and insects is important in natural and agricultural communities. It has been shown that plant community composition has an effect on insect pollinators and herbivores. However, these...
The traditional method for producing taxonomic illustrations requires the preparation of inked copies of pencil originals. These individual figures are then grouped into plates for publication. I describe an alternative, computer-based...
Key to the study of evolutionary biology is understanding the process through which new species form and are maintained. Reinforcement, the process through which prezygotic isolation between species is enhanced upon secondary contact due...
Non-random mating is presumed to be an important mechanism that allows for the maintenance of genetic variation. Assortative mating has been studied extensively in organisms that possess defined ways in which sperm is transferred to eggs...
Creatine kinase (CK) and arginine kinase (AK) are members of a highly conserved family of phosphoryl transferase enzymes known as phosphagen kinases. CK and AK play a central role in cells that display high and variable rates of ATP...
The Variability of Certain Life-History Parameters of Early Juvenile Gag Grouper (Mycteroperca Microlepis, Pisces: Serranidae) in the Northern Gulf of Mexico
Gag grouper, Mycteroperca microlepis, compose an important recreational and commercial fishery along the Gulf coast and Eastern Seaboard of the United States (Coleman et al. 2000, Morris et al. 2000, and Musick et al. 2000). Like many...
A long-standing paradox in evolutionary biology is the maintenance of genetic variation in traits that are strongly tied to fitness. How is it that variation can be maintained in ecologically important traits when directional selection...
Many venom proteins have presumably been convergently recruited by taxa from diverse venomous lineages. These toxic proteins have characteristics that allow them to remain stable in solution and have a high propensity for toxic effects...
Understanding how a single genome can produce drastically different phenotypes is a central theme in evolutionary biology. It requires a keen understanding of the ecological, molecular, and genomic regulatory mechanisms driving...
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
