Research

The theme of my research program is to understand the proximate and ultimate factors that shape correlated behavioral traits, or behavioral syndromes. A behavioral syndrome occurs when individuals behave in a consistent way in a variety of different contexts. For example, some individuals might be generally aggressive; they are aggressive in the presence of competitors, mates, predators, food, etc. If the rank order differences between individuals are maintained across contexts, such that, for example, the individuals that are more aggressive toward conspecifics are also the individuals that are most bold under predation risk, the statistical result is a correlation between behaviors in different functional contexts.

Behavioral syndromes have several far-reaching implications for the study of animal behavior. For example, whereas most studies in behavioral ecology typically focus on average behavior (e.g., shifts in foraging behavior in the presence of predators), behavioral syndromes emphasize individual variation in behavior within populations. What’s more, most research projects focus on behavior in a particular context decoupled from the rest of the organism’s life. For example, investigators studying mating behavior rarely consider how individual variation in mating tactics might be related to feeding, antipredator, contest or dispersal behaviors outside of the mating season. However, the behavioral syndromes view emphasizes correlations between behaviors through development and in different contexts.

Finally, the most controversial implication of behavioral syndromes is the suggestion that they might represent constraints on optimal behavior. Whereas most of behavioral ecology assumes that behavior is plastic and individuals adaptively switch to the appropriate behavior in different situations, the behavioral syndromes view emphasizes the possibility of suboptimal behavior in any given context. If individuals have a general tendency to behave the same way in a variety of situations, but high levels of aggression are not always favored, then those individuals might be inappropriately aggressive in certain situations. For example, if some individuals are generally aggressive toward all stimuli, then they might be overly aggressive toward predators or toward their offspring.

My empirical research program is devoted to applying an overall integrative view towards studying behavioral syndromes in threespined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus). I am interested in looking at behavioral syndromes from both the ‘bottom up’ and the ‘top down’, which requires using techniques from diverse fields, from endocrinology to population biology, with an eye toward using new genomic tools.  A promising strategy for studying behavioral syndromes is to compare the relationships between behaviors at different time scales (at one point in time, through ontogeny, and over evolutionary time), and to compare physiological mechanisms at each of these scales.

I am also interested in the effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals, and anthropogenic activities generally, on animal behavior. Endocrine disrupting chemicals are chemicals in the environment that can interfere with the vertebrate endocrine system. Increasingly, widespread abnormal or maladaptive behaviors have been attributed to the presence of endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment. At the same time, behavioral endpoints are becoming increasingly recognized as sensitive, reliable biomarkers of exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals. I am interested in whether long term, chronic exposure to environmentally-relevant concentrations of endocrine disrupters can produce subtle effects on behavior, and whether such effects have consequences at the population level.

Threespined sticklebacks:

Sticklebacks are especially suited for integrative studies on behavioral syndromes. Isolated populations of freshwater sticklebacks from different drainages represent phylogenetically independent colonization episodes by marine ancestors, providing a unique opportunity to study phenotypic evolution in a replicated fashion. Another reason why sticklebacks are an excellent model system is because there is a long and rich history of ethological studies on sticklebacks, which has provided a wealth of information on the natural history and biology of this fish. Finally, sticklebacks are becoming a model system in molecular genetics as their genome has recently been sequenced, and a wealth of whole-genome information is becoming available.

I work on both Scottish and Californian populations of sticklebacks.

Current research projects include:

Analyses of whole-body homogenate concentrations of cortisol using radioimmunoassay (RIA). Collaborators: Tom Pottinger (University of Lancaster), Felicity Huntingford (University of Glasgow)

Analyses of brain monoamines using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Collaborators: Svante Winberg (University of Oslo), Tobias Backstrom (Uppsala University)

Analyses of DNA sequence variation in different stickleback populations. Collaborator: Ripan Malhi (Trace Genetics)

Measurement of candidate gene expression using rt-PCR. Collaborator: Katie Peichel (Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Institute)

Tests of the fitness consequences of behavioral syndromes using semi-natural experiments with predators. Collaborator: Andy Sih (UC Davis)

Department of Animal Biology
Institute for Genomic Biology
University of Illinois

Created 04/19/2006
Updated 09/11/2006