PI: Matthew A. Wund
Professor of Biology
The College of New Jersey
2000 Pennington Road, Ewing, NJ 08618
609-771-2897
wundm@tcnj.edu
Education:
Ph.D. Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, 2005
The University of Michigan
M.S. Biology, 2001
The University of Michigan
B.S. Biology, 1999
The College of New Jersey
Phenotypic Plasticity and Adaptive Evolution
I am broadly interested in how populations respond to novel environments, both from the perspective of individuals expressing altered morphology and behavior (phenotypic plasticity), as well as populations evolving over successive generations. Interactions between developmental and evolutionary responses to environmental variation can have important consequences for the ways in which populations adapt to new challenges. However, testing hypotheses about whether and how plasticity impacts the initial phases of evolutionary adaptation can be difficult because most of the species we encounter have been long adapted to their current conditions. Threespine stickleback fish (Gasterosteus aculeatus) provide a great opportunity to overcome this empirical challenge.
The Threespine Stickleback Adaptive Radiation
The adaptive radiation of threespine stickleback fish are exceptional in that modern marine populations represent the ancestral state of the many derived, freshwater forms found throughout the northern latitudes. Thus, plasticity in ancestral, marine populations can be directly evaluated and compared to that of the descendent, freshwater populations in order to resolve open questions about how plasticity influences evolutionary outcomes.
Much of our research focuses on stickleback populations in south-central Alaska. The primary questions our lab seeks to answer are 1) whether and how plasticity influenced the repeated evolution of benthic and limnetic ecotypes that occur in shallow and deep lakes, respectively, 2) how might behavioral plasticity, including learning, allow stickleback to cope with the introduction of novel predators, and 3) does phenotypic plasticity in traits related to mate choice lead to reproductive isolation between newly-divergent populations, thereby promoting (or perhaps inhibiting) adaptive divergence?
