Dissertation Research: Understanding the Defended Phenotype: The Importance of Predator Diet and Environmental Context on Inducible Defenses

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Surviving in the face of environmental variation provides a significant challenge for many organisms. All organisms must balance the conflicting demands of gaining resources, finding mates, and avoiding predators. To know how to balance these demands, organisms rely on a variety of cues (visual, tactile, chemical) that provide information about how to best allocation their time and energy. In aquatic systems, many organisms use chemical cues (that are emitted when a predator consumes its prey) to gain information about predation risk. These chemicals induce prey to change their behavior and morphology so that they are less susceptible to predators; however, these defenses come at the cost of slower growth and decreased reproduction. Therefore, by choosing to devote energy to anti-predator defenses, the prey reduce their ability to gather resources and compete with other species in the community. Consequently, to understand ecological communities we must understand how species respond to the information provided by predation cues. While numerous studies have determined that chemical cues affect prey behavior and morphology, we often do not know the reason why prey react the way they do and whether or not the responses observed in laboratory experiments are representative of what happens in nature. Therefore, our research is designed to determine how prey detect and interpret the chemical cues of predators under more natural conditions. The broader impacts of this project include training undergraduate assistants, disseminating our work in top-tier journals and at international conferences, and striving to report our work in the popular press.