Behavioral and Evolutionary Ecology
Our research focuses on the evolution and ecology of phenotypic plasticity and how it helps populations respond to environmental change. 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 temperature-dependent sex determination and thermal biology.
News
July 2025
Two new papers out from the theses of former PhD students! Dr. Rebecca Raynal demonstrated that the impact of temperature on snails differs among their life stages. Dr. Kris Wild used trackers and accelerometers on bearded dragons to provide a rare look at thermoregulation and thermal performance in a wild lizard.
August 2024
PhD student Davey Dor has opened the door for new questions about nesting biology by putting accelerometers onto the backs of hatchling sea turtles and observing their emergence from the nest, newly accepted to Proc B.
July 2024
Students in the lab have been hard at work pushing the bounds of knowledge on thermal ecology and thermoregulatory behaviour! Check out Mitch Hodgson's PhD paper on acclimation to fluctuating environments AND Rachel Chan's honours thesis demonstrating how thermal mean and variance interact to drive thermoregulatory behaviour.
December 2023
Claudia Crowther won the prestigious Australasian Evolution Society Student Paper Award and gave an excellent plenary at the annual conference - congratulations Claudia!
August 2023
Claudia Crowther's excellent paper examining how plasticity influences trait evolution has been published in Evolution Letters
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.
