NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2011

Cressler Clayton E, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2011, Intersections of Biology and Mathematical and Physical Sciences. The fellowship supports a research and training plan in a host laboratory for the Fellow at the intersection of biology with mathematics. The title of the research and training plan for this fellowship to Clayton Cressler is "A theoretical-empirical approach to life history evolution under joint starvation and predation risks in Daphnia." The host institution for this fellowship is Queen's University with sponsoring scientists Drs. William Nelson and Troy Day. The need to avoid starvation, on one hand, and to avoid predation, on the other, are two of the strongest selective forces acting on animal populations. Furthermore, many traits affect an organism's interaction with both its resources and its predators, so starvation and predation risk will often jointly affect trait evolution. However, very little is known about the relative importance of each risk to trait evolution for any organism. Disentangling the interaction between starvation and predation risk requires an intimate dialogue between biological experiment and mathematical theory. This project employs such a dialogue to (1) gain insight into how different resource and predator environments drive selection on life history in the zooplankter Daphnia pulex; (2) identify the traits most strongly influenced by each force; and (3) explore how feedbacks between resources, predation, and life history contribute to the coexistence of different Daphnia genotypes. Training objectives include learning experimental techniques for the model organism Daphnia pulex, using empirical data to parameterize dynamical models at both the individual- and population-levels, and rigorously confronting these models with novel experimental data that definitively test model predictions or point out the need for better models. Data will be shared with the Daphnia Genome Consortium for public use. Broader impacts include mentoring undergraduates from both mathematics and biology to work across disciplinary boundaries, a crucial skill for tackling the complexity of natural systems.