RUI: Nutrition and Life History Transitions

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The amount and quality of food eaten are important factors that affect the growth and development in animals, as well as their ability to respond to environmental stressors. This project will investigate how nutrition affects the response to nutritional and environmental stress during early life stages, and how these varied responses affect developmental timing and future fitness. The investigators will focus their studies on amphibian tadpoles because they are easy to study in the field and the laboratory, and because the physiological mechanisms involved in development in tadpoles and mammalian fetuses are similar. The investigators expect that physiological factors that vary with nutritive condition (neuropeptide Y and leptin) will alter the sensitivity of the stress axis at the molecular level in the brain, such that tadpoles in better condition have more robust responses to environmental stressors and have greater growth and survival probabilities throughout life than tadpoles in poor condition. The findings from this research will increase our understanding of how nutritional condition interacts with stress during early development to alter the timing of metamorphosis, and may relate to the ways these factors affect the timing of other life history transitions, such as birth or puberty. In addition, this project will relate the experience of stress during early development to the increased threat of health problems and survival during later life stages. The project will also have a great impact on science education because undergraduate students will primarily conduct the experiments and analyses, thereby providing excellent training for graduate programs in ecology or biomedical research. This project will also involve the training of a post-doctoral student, who will be able to extend their research and teaching skills, and serve as a positive role model to undergraduates who are not familiar with the experience of graduate-level science education.