Research:
My interests lie in the interplay of microevolutionary process, macroevolutionary pattern, and ecological interactions. Traditionally, these concepts have been thought to operate on separate and distinct temporal and spatial scales – the “evolutionary play” in the “ecological theater”. Yet recent thinking has proposed that communities may be the result of both of these processes, either of which may predominate, resulting in communities that are primarily structured by long-term, stabilized evolutionary interactions, or by short-term, invasion/competition interactions. For me, the resulting questions are addressed at the intersection of the emerging fields of community genetics and comparative quantitative genetics: how, for instance, can we begin to understand the effects of populations’ genetic character on the state of communities, and the reverse? Is there an ecologically and evolutionarily meaningful measure of that character that can be contrasted between populations (e.g., variance-covariance matrices)? At what point, in terms of temporal and spatial differentiation, might those differences begin to have ecological and/or evolutionary implications? At what scales might one predominate over the other?
To begin to examine these questions, I am employing wild yeast assemblages, systems which lend themselves well to quantitative genetic studies and are tractable as experimental communities. Collections have been made in the Sonoran Desert (cactus-yeast-Drosophila system)and the Blue Ridge Mountains (fruit-yeast-vector).
Ancillary projects (read: other hare-brained ideas) include the ecological origins of pathogenic yeasts, an alternative fractal origin of metabolic scaling, and the evolution of hemoglobin in iron-limited seas.
Publications:
Starmer, W.T., R.A. Schmedicke and M.A. Lachance. 2003. The origin of the cactus-yeast community. FEMS Yeast Research 3: 441-448. |
