photo credits: Matt Wilkins 

ecological & evolutionary connections between phenotypic variation and population-level patterns

Our group is fascinated by relationships among different scales of biological organization. Questions about individual variation (behavior, morphology, and genotype) and population patterns (social and genetic structure, reproductive isolation, phenotype divergence) are usually addressed in isolation from one another, but we find the relationship between these levels particularly exciting. To make explicit links between different scales of analysis, we test theory-driven hypotheses related to both the function and proximate mechanisms that underlie various aspects of phenotype and combine experimental and comparative approaches to explore relationships between individual-level variation and larger-scale patterns within and among populations.