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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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The School of Biology welcomes David Reznick, a professor of biology at the University of California-Riverside, on "Experimental Studies of the Interaction between Ecology and Evolution in a Natural Ecosystem"
Abstract:
Our traditional perspective of the relationship between ecology and evolution is that ecology drives evolution. The environment defines a template and evolution by natural selection shapes the organism to fit that template. At the same time, the perspective is that evolution is so much slower than ecology that we can model ecological processes in a fashion that implicitly assumes that evolution does not occur; organisms are treated as constants. A different perspective that has emerged from some theory and laboratory studies, with limited support from nature, is that ecology and evolution are interacting processes that can reciprocally shape one another.
My colleagues and I are evaluating this proposition as part of a multidisciplinary study of guppies on the island of Trinidad. Our work was inspired first by the observation that evolutionary interactions happen on time frames comparable to ecological interactions, which makes it more plausible that the two processes can interact. We were also inspired by the role that phenomena like density regulation or the indirect effects of predators appear to have played in shaping some aspects of guppy evolution. Our argument is that “density regulation” and “indirect effects of predators” are actually black boxes created by evolutionary biologists. These labels acknowledge how a process of interest is influenced by other ecological factors without attempting to name or characterize what those factors might be.
Our current research includes replicate introduction experiments, modeled on those of the past, in which we are integrating ecosystems ecology with evolutionary biology in an attempt to characterize the mechanisms that underlie these labels. Our work also includes replicate, factorial experiments performed in artificial streams and the development of novel, adaptive dynamic theory that defines the consequences of the integration of evolutionary and ecological processes.
