Dr. Emilie Snell-Rood University of Minnesota Responses to novel and changing environments: predicting how plasticity may interact with evolutionary change Why do some organisms thrive in novel and changing environments while others do not? While both plastic and evolutionary changes may allow populations to survive and diversify in new conditions, it is not always clear how these processes interact. In this talk, I walk through how a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanism of plasticity has implications for thinking about costs, life history tradeoffs, and the precision of a trait match to a new environment. Using examples from behavioral and physiological plasticity in butterflies, and resource variation across butterfly species, I will discuss how a more developmental perspective can help us to move forward in thinking about how plasticity affects evolution in novel environments.
Bio: Emilie Snell-Rood is an Associate Professor of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at the University of Minnesota. She received her bachelors in biology at the College of William and Mary in Virginia and a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from University of Arizona. She did a postdoc at Indiana University before starting her position at Minnesota in 2011. As she will discuss today, Emilie is interested in why organisms vary in developmental flexibility and what this means for survival in new environments. She has worked on a range of systems including butterflies, dung beetles, birds, and mammals. In the educational space, she is also developing materials for collaborative interactions between biology and bio-inspired design. Comments are closed.
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