Browsing Faculty of Arts and Sciences by FAS Department "Biology, Organismic and Evolutionary"
Now showing items 1-20 of 36
-
A Whole New Whorl: An Exploration of the Morphology, Genetics, and Ecological Function of the Staminodes of Aquilegia
(2018-05-03)The organ identity genes that encode the four organs of the canonical floral body plan are well characterized. In contrast, the downstream developmental pathways involved in programming the morphological differences found ... -
Abiotic Influences on Free-Living Microbial Communities in Hydrothermal Vent Ecosystems
(2016-05-18)Hydrothermal vent ecosystems are defined by steep thermal and chemical gradients. Chemosynthetic microorganisms are the primary producers in these systems, utilizing the available chemical energy to support substantial ... -
Adaptation in the forest deer mouse: evolution, genetics, and development
(2015-05-16)Variation in the shape, size, and number of segments along the vertebral column underlies a vast amount of vertebrate diversity. Although the molecular pathways controlling vertebrate segmentation during normal development ... -
Causes and consequences of coexistence in the Vachellia drepanolobium ant-plant mutualism
(2017-05-10)This thesis focuses on a mutualism between the East African acacia tree Vachellia drepanolobium and the species of canopy-dwelling ants that inhabit it. The tree provides the ants with nesting space in the canopy and ... -
Causes and Consequences of Lung Loss in Salamanders
(2016-02-26)Lungs were once thought to be a universal feature of tetrapods and essential for vertebrate life on land. This view changed in the late 19th century with the discovery of several salamander species that lack lungs. Since ... -
Challenging Cooperation: Inequality, Global Commons, Future Generations
(2016-04-25)Cooperation is abundant in the world around us, spanning all levels of biological and social organisation. Yet the existence and maintenance of cooperation is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective because the costs ... -
Complexity in Mutualisms: Indirect Interactions With Multiple Parties
(2015-09-23)Ant-plants provide ants with rewards such as housing and food in exchange for protection from herbivores. These protection mutualisms are complex webs of both direct interactions, such as ants feeding on host plant extrafloral ... -
Convergent Interactions Among Pitcher Plant Microcosms in North America and Southeast Asia
(2016-08-03)Ecosystems are composed of diverse suites of organisms whose interactions are mediated by both the biotic and abiotic constraints of their environments. The complexity of ecosystems makes them both resilient and difficult ... -
Determining drought sensitivity of the Amazon forest: does plant hydraulics matter?
(2015-09-08)Climate change is projected to cause significant shifts in precipitation patterns across the Amazon basin. This dissertation is designed to address key uncertainties surrounding our ability to predict the fate of the Amazon ... -
Disentangling the Coevolutionary Histories of Animal Gut Microbiomes
(2015-05-17)Animals associate with microbes in complex interactions with profound fitness consequences. These interactions play an enormous role in the evolution of both partners, and recent advances in sequencing technology have ... -
Disentangling the Roles of Form and Motion in Fish Swimming Performance
(2017-05-11)A central theme of comparative biomechanics is linking patterns of variation in morphology with variation in locomotor performance. This presents a unique challenge in fishes, given their extraordinary morphological diversity ... -
Ecology and Evolution of the Ferns of Moorea and Tahiti, French Polynesia
(2016-09-12)Ferns are the only major lineage of land plants with haploid (gametophyte) and diploid (sporophyte) stages that can grow separately from each other for extended periods. Gametophytes, as the sexual stage, are critical to ... -
The Effect of Development and Ecology on the Evolution of Ovary Size in Drosophila
(2015-05-20)How the size of an organ is established and altered during evolution is poorly understood. The ovary of fruit flies of the genus Drosophila serves as an interesting model for understanding organ size evolution, as the ... -
Estimating TMRCA, Modeling the Fixed Pedigree, and the Effect of the Y Chromosome on the Chromatin Landscape
(2016-09-06)This thesis consists of three chapters on different topics. Chapter 1: We demonstrate the advantages of using information at many unlinked loci in order to better calibrate estimates of the time to the most recent common ... -
Evolution of Parasitism in the Lycaenidae (Lepidoptera)
(2015-10-01)Of the four most diverse insect orders, the Lepidoptera contain remarkably few predatory and/or parasitic taxa, and while species with carnivorous life histories have evolved independently numerous times in moths and ... -
Evolution of sweet taste perception in hummingbirds
(2015-05-17)Mammals have three members of the small taste receptor gene family responsible for the perception of sweet and savory tastes: two genes (T1R2 and T1R3) comprise the canonical sweet receptor, and a third gene, T1R1, acts ... -
Evolution of the Amphibian Head and Neck: Fate and Patterning of Cranial Mesoderm in the Axolotl (Ambystoma Mexicanum)
(2016-02-19)The vertebrate head is a complex structure derived from all three embryonic germ layers. Cranial mesoderm forms most of the neurocranium, cardiovascular tissues and voluntary muscles required for intake of food and oxygenated ... -
Evolutionary Dynamics of a Multiple-Ploidy System in Arabidopsis Arenosa
(2015-05-18)Whole-genome duplication (WGD), which leads to polyploidy, has been implicated in speciation and biological novelty. In plants, many species have experienced historical bouts of WGD or exhibit extant ploidy variation, which ... -
Foraging in a Complex World: From Individual Flight Performance to Collective Behavior in Bumblebees (Bombus Impatiens)
(2017-01-27)Foraging is a crucial and remarkably complex behavior that is key to survival. For social insects such as bumblebees, successful foraging depends on a combination of individual traits (e.g. physiological and biomechanical ... -
Frontiers in Coalescent Theory: Pedigrees, Identity-by-Descent, and Sequentially Markov Coalescent Models
(2016-05-14)The coalescent is a stochastic process that describes the genetic ancestry ofindividuals sampled from a population. It is one of the main tools of theoretical population genetics and has been used as the basis of many ...