NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2018

Tanner Jessie C, Saint Paul MN

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2018, Research Using Biological Collections. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will utilize biological collections in innovative ways. Understanding why some animal traits evolve more rapidly than others is a fundamental goal of evolutionary biology. Reproductive traits are often among the fastest changing traits, but despite longstanding ideas about what drives their evolution, biologists still lack direct evidence of how these traits evolve in vertebrate animals such as mammals. The fellow will investigate how competition among males may drive changes in reproductive traits. First, the fellow will use lines of experimentally evolved house mice, in which changes in male reproductive traits have been documented, to determine whether male and female reproductive traits have evolved together. Second, the fellow will use recently developed methods to determine how fast these traits have evolved among species within a group of Australian rodents, and whether these changes have been driven by competition among males. This work will provide some of the first direct evidence about what drives the evolution of male and female reproductive phenotypes in mammals. It will also contribute to the toolkit available to scientists by establishing new methods for the study of evolution using museum collections. Finally, it will result in new international collaborations between scientists in the US and Australia, while training a new post-doctoral researcher in cutting edge methods. The fellow will investigate the hypothesis that the mammalian baculum has evolved via selection driven by male-male competition. First, the fellow will use experimentally evolved, wild-derived house mice to empirically determine whether and how female reproductive morphology co-varies with baculum shape. Second, using phylogenetic comparative methods and specimens from 63 species of muroid rodents, the fellow will determine the diversification rate of bacula and female reproductive tracts across a molecular phylogeny. Finally, the fellow will quantify the relative importance of male-male competition across Australian muroid rodents and determine its role in the evolutionary diversification of reproductive morphology. The proposed fellowship activities will significantly expand the fellow's range of research expertise with respect to both ideas and concrete skillsets, enabling a more integrative approach to the study of evolution and animal behavior in her academic career. Broader impacts activities are aimed at promoting the participation of indigenous peoples, who are underrepresented in post-secondary education and the sciences in both the US and Australia. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.