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Evolutionary Ecology LaboratoryResearch projects in the Evolutionary Ecology Lab address questions of adaptation and life-history evolution in a wide variety of organisms. Three project areas are under active investigation:
Reproductive phenology and sexual allocation in flowering plants
The theory of sex allocation explains how organisms evolve to distribute their reproductive investment among sons and daughters, or among male and female functions. From a few fundamentals of biology (such as the equivalence of male and female genetic contributions to sexually produced offspring), and from testable alternatives for the shape of 'gain curves' (functions that describe the fitness returns from resource investment), it is possible to predict a variety of reproductive features of organisms (Charnov 1982). Sexual allocation has been studied intensively in the past two decades, and the underlying theory has become a fundamental part of evolutionary biology. The theory has not, however, been conspicuously successful in explaining basic reproductive patterns in flowering plants, especially the much smaller investment made in male function (flowering and pollen dispersal) compared to female function (flowering, fruit and seed maturation). Where does the shortfall lie? A feature of angiosperm reproduction that is ignored by standard sex allocation theory is the pronounced separation in time between male investment (early in the flowering season) and most female investment (later in a reproductive bout). A theory that incorporates reproductive phenology has been emerging in the 1990s (Burd and Head 1992; Ashman 1993; Brunet and Charlesworth 1995; Seger and Eckhart 1996; Sakai and Harada 1998), but theory is running far ahead of experimental efforts to test it. We are conducting a project, funded by the Australian Research Council and headed by Dr Angela Baker, to test the role of reproductive phenology in sexual allocation. We are using well known floral-timing mutations of Arapidopsis thaliana (expressed in otherwise identical genetic backgrounds) to produce plants that differ in the temporal pattern of flowering. We will therefore be able to measure and assess the consequences (if any) of single genes on sex allocation. Background information:
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