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Research Interests:
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.
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