Aim: Evolutionary divergence may be caused by both biotic and abiotic factors such as landscape features or barriers to dispersal. Using an integration of species distribution modeling and population structure, we can understand how habitat, geography, and evolutionary history c…
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Selection and demography are powerful forces that shape the evolution of populations, and these forces can be investigated in greater detail with the advent of genomic technologies for non-model organisms. Further, long-term population monitoring of wild populations of long-live…
African dwarf toads of the genus Poyntonophrynus are an interesting group of frogs found across southern Africa in arid and semi-arid environments. While these toads are unique, relatively little detail is known about their ecology and life history. This genus is surrounded by t…
Understanding the relationships between DNA sequence and organismal phenotypes has been a central goal across a wide variety of biological subdisciplines throughout the history of genetics research. Studies of the developmental genetic mechanisms underlying phenotypes aim to inc…
Environmental fluctuations are ubiquitous in nature and can serve to drive phenotypic differences among individuals in an environment-specific manner, a phenomenon known as phenotypic plasticity. Phenotypic plasticity can have implications for an organism’s fitness. Here, I addr…
An important goal in the study of protein evolution is understanding which genetic changes that fixed in nature were selected for and why. However, understanding the functional consequence of any given mutation is a challenge because the effects of amino-acid changes are highly …
Termites in the genus Reticulitermes (Blattodea: Rhinotermitidae) are distributed across the eastern United States, including the southern Appalachian Mountains, a region incredibly rich in biodiversity. The eastern subterranean termite, Reticulitermes flavipes, has been uninent…
Pests of human habitats may harbor and disperse pathogens that cause human disease. One such pest is the German cockroach (Blattella germanica), which is known to harbor numerous pathogens, including Klebsiella and Pseudomonas. The aim of this study is to reveal the importance o…
Chapter 1: Divergence, gene flow, and the origin of leapfrog geographic distributions: The history of color pattern variation in Phyllobates poison-dart frogs
In this thesis I describe and analyze the life-history of the Western Tiger Salamander (Ambystoma mavortium). This two-part thesis includes an analysis of a life-history database and a laboratory growth experiment. I first summarize the life-history of A. mavortium in the Northe…
Phylogenetic analyses that incorporate extinct taxa and assess models for absolute fit allow a more complete picture of evolutionary history to be captured. The Fossilized Birth-Death (FBD) model is a robust yet flexible model of diversification and sampling that considers all a…
Morphology is one of the oldest branches of science, encompassing the form, structure, and transformation of natural materials, whether biotic or abiotic. In the context of contemporary Biology, morphology may be most broadly conceived as the qualitative and quantitative theory …
This dissertation is part of a multi-institutional study of southwestern white pine (P. strobiformis) in Mexico and the USA where the species fills important ecological roles. Collectively, our research team seeks to better understand the genetic, ecophysiological, evolutionary,…
A central goal of conservation biology is to identify and understand the factors that lead to extinction. The Earth is currently undergoing a 6th mass extinction event, in large part because of human activity. In the last century, rates of extinction have increased anywhere from…
Cultural transmission has long been a key organizing principle within anthropology, but the effort to formalize cultural transmission models and fit them to archaeological data is more recent, stimulated by work by Robert Dunnell in the 1970's. Since then, the use of cultural tr…
My dissertation examines the modern ideological concept of children and individualism in Republican Chinese literature. It draws upon eugenics discourse, ideological essays and fictional stories to examine the emergence of the modern individual amid the tensions within the ideol…
The evolution of eusocial behavior has allowed some species to achieve ecological dominance across terrestrial ecosystems. While knowledge of the mechanistic basis of insect sociality is growing, basic natural history information is still severely lacking for some social lineage…
Antibiotic resistance is a growing public-health concern. Efforts to control the emergence and spread of resistance would benefit from an improved ability to forecast when and how it will evolve. To predict the evolution of resistance with accuracy, we must understand and integr…
In order to function properly, all biological organisms must exhibit some amount of morphological integration. That is, some parts of the anatomy of an organism must work and change in concert with one another to allow that organism to move around, to eat, or to defend itself (O…