Biological Sciences Colloquium: Dr. Gerlinde Höbel

Dr. Gerlinde Höbel, professor of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at UWM, will be presenting a talk about her work entitled “Sexual selection theory meets frog behavior: on the architecture of mate choice decisions.”

The abstract is as follows:

Mate choice is an important cause of natural and sexual selection, driving the evolution of ornaments and promoting diversification and speciation. Mate choice decisions arise from the interaction of several components, and knowledge of whether they interact, and how, is crucial for understanding their contributions to selection. Research in my lab has focused on the relationship between preference functions (attractiveness ranking of prospective mates) and choosiness (effort invested in obtaining the preferred mate). We have shown that those are independent components of mate choice decisions in two species of treefrogs, suggesting that the joint study of variation in both components is required to gain a complete understanding of how mate choice contributes to sexual selection and speciation. We also uncovered surprising levels of individual variation in preference functions, which suggests that population-level curves may accurately capture the direction of sexual selection, but depending on the properties of the constituting individual functions they may over- or underestimate the strength of selection.

The presentation will begin at 3:00 PM in Lapham Hall N101, preceded by an informal reception from 2:45 – 3:00PM.