The assistant professor of biology presented her co-authored paper titled "Are female mating decisions adaptive when environments vary? A test using natural resource variation" at the 2015 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual meeting.
Have you ever wondered how animals choose mates? Mate choice contributes to the formation of new species and the evolution of elaborate animal ornaments, and it has fascinated biologists since Darwin.
Recent work by evolutionary biologists suggests that not only do animals choose mates, but their decisions may vary according to the environment they are currently experiencing. For example, female insects of one species discriminate against poor quality males, but only when they meet them near high quality food resources.
Assistant Professor Jen Hamel in the Elon Department of Biology and Christine Miller of the University of Florida recently learned that this behavior has likely evolved because these females pay high costs for mating with the wrong males in this one environmental context.
Hamel presented their results at the 2015 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual meeting in West Palm Beach, Fla., from Jan. 3-7, 2015.
Her talk was titled ” Are female mating decisions adaptive when environments vary? A test using natural resource variation.”