International Research Fellowship Program: Differences Between Individuals and Populations of Threespined Stickleback in Boldness and Agressiveness

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0301899BellThe International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Alison M. Bell to work with Dr. Felicity A. Huntingford at the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, United Kingdom.This project is a study of a behavioral syndrome in threespined stickleback, a widely-distributed freshwater fish well-suited for testing evolutionary hypotheses. The PI will study differences between individuals and populations for boldness and aggressiveness in three ways. First she will ascertain whether boldness and aggressiveness are similarly correlated in a number of populations which differ in predation risk. Second, she will investigate a physiological mechanism underlying both behaviors in order to infer how the two traits might be related proximally. Third she will examine the evolution of the 'boldness-aggressiveness' syndrome across the populations with a phylogenetic perspective to ask why the traits are correlated in some populations but not others.