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My research concerns the interface between function and behaviour. I am particularly interested in how physiological capacities affect the evolution of reproductive strategies and associated traits. Although lizards feature prominently in my research as they are in many ways ideal organisms for addressing broad evolutionary and behavioural hypotheses, I also use invertebrates such as beetles, spiders, crabs and crickets as study organisms where appropriate.

 

To gain a better understanding of trait evolution at multiple levels of organization I employ integrative approaches wherever possible and have used methods such as performance measures (i.e. any measure of an organism conducting a dynamic ecologically relevant task such as jumping or biting), phylogenetic comparisons, demographic mark-recapture techniques, behavioural measures, kinetic analyses, morphometrics and hormone analyses, amongst others.

 

 

My primary research focus involves the functional components of sexual selection - for example, do male armaments signal information to rivals on physiological capacities that may affect the outcomes of male fights? Do male and female performance or physiological capacities influence female mate choice? My recent work in this area has focussed on the proximate mechanisms underlying and enabling male combat in Caribbean Anolis lizards.

 

I am also interested in the evolution and expression of secondary sexual signals, and am currently investigating the relationship between whole-organism performance and male signalling from life-history and quantitative genetics perspectives.

 

 

 

 

 

A more mechanistic part of my research program deals with identifying and understanding the factors that may constrain or promote the evolution of performance, and then examining how those factors interact or trade-off. For example, locomotor performance in some lizards is affected by both sex and temperature, such that males and females exhibit different thermal performance curves. This may have important consequences for ecological performance in the field, potentially resulting in sex-specific behavioural strategies within a given ecological context.

 

I am currently applying a life-history approach to the study of locomotor performance, in particular investigating the effects of differential resource allocation and condition on various performance traits.