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

面对环境变化的生存对许多生物体来说是一个重大挑战。 所有的生物都必须在获取资源、寻找配偶和躲避捕食者这三者之间的冲突中取得平衡。 为了知道如何平衡这些需求，生物体依赖于各种线索（视觉，触觉，化学），这些线索提供了如何最好地分配时间和能量的信息。 在水生系统中，许多生物使用化学线索（当捕食者消耗其猎物时发出）来获得有关捕食风险的信息。 这些化学物质诱导猎物改变它们的行为和形态，使它们不那么容易受到捕食者的影响;然而，这些防御措施的代价是生长缓慢和繁殖减少。 因此，通过选择将能量投入到反捕食者防御中，猎物降低了他们收集资源和与社区中其他物种竞争的能力。 因此，要了解生态群落，我们必须了解物种如何回应捕食线索所提供的信息。 虽然许多研究已经确定化学线索会影响猎物的行为和形态，但我们通常不知道猎物反应的原因，以及在实验室实验中观察到的反应是否代表自然界中发生的事情。 因此，我们的研究旨在确定猎物如何在更自然的条件下检测和解释捕食者的化学线索。 该项目的更广泛的影响包括培训本科生助理，在顶级期刊和国际会议上传播我们的工作，并努力在大众媒体上报道我们的工作。

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.