Behavioral and Evolutionary Ecology

Our research focuses on the evolution and ecology of phenotypic plasticity, particularly in reproductive strategies. When is plasticity adaptive, how does it evolve in different environments, and does it allow populations to track or adapt to changing environments?  Topics of interest include the annual timing of reproduction in response to climate, division of resources among sons and daughters, temperature-dependent embryonic development, thermal biology under different climates, and alterations in behavior and reproduction under parasitic infection. We employ theoretical and empirical approaches to explore these questions, and focus on vertebrate study organisms. Our main research foci are in the study of sex allocation in mammals, temperature-dependent sex determination and thermal biology.

News

May 2023
Claudia Crowther has submitted an excellent Ph.D. thesis! And now she's off to Michigan State University for a postdoctoral research position.

September 2021
My lockdown labor of love: a comprehensive review of theory related to Environmental Sex Determination. Thanks to the editors of Sexual Development for the invitation to contribute to the special issue.

November 2020
Gracie Liu's herculean honours work is published! Read it to understand how maternal stress hormones, body condition and thermal condition interact to influence offspring traits in jacky dragons.

May 2019
Jacky dragon thermal biology differs across elevation - read Mitch Hodgson's honours work in Journal of Thermal Biology.

May 2018
The Reptile Development Database has been accepted to Scientific Data and is reviewed in an upcoming special issue of Journal of Experimental Zoology.