THE LABORATORY OF ECOLOGICAL AND EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS AT NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY

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Allonemobius
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THE LABORATORY OF ECOLOGICAL AND EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS
AT
THE DEPARTMENT OF BIOLOGY, NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY

The research in our laboratory, which has been generously supported by NSF since 1986, is evolutionary in nature and hence multidisciplinary in approaches and techniques. The evolutionary process that attracts most of our attention is species formation, the process responsible for the diversity of life on earth. The major model system for our studies is the hybrid zone between the ground crickets, Allonemobius fasciatus and A. socius. Over the course of the past decade work in our laboratory has demonstrated that these species are strongly, but incompletely, isolated by conspecific sperm precedence. In other words, females mate with males of both species, but their eggs are fertilized, for the most part, by the sperm of conspecific males. We are now attempting to understand the nature of sperm precedence between populations, behaviors that effect the strength of sperm precedence, and the dynamics of its effectiveness in mixed species populations. The sperm precedence work is supported by a NSF collaboration with Sergey Gavrilets, William Rice, and Willie Swanson. This work, in combination with other efforts underway in our laboratory and in the field, should provide one of the most detailed looks at a speciation event that has yet been put together. It has already provided us with important insights into the antagonistic nature of male-female interactions during mating and into the contingent nature of the relative fitnesses of hybrid and pure species genotypes in nature. Students entering the Laboratory of Ecological and Evolutionary Genetics are welcome to develop a project centering on Allonemobius or to develop a more independent study.

Dan Howard directs the Laboratory of Ecological and Evolutionary Genetics. He and his students are the forces behind the work described above. However, the Laboratory of Ecological and Evolutionary Genetics is a multi-user facility and other faculty members within the Department of Biology, such as William Boecklen and Elba Serrano have taken advantage of the Laboratory's equipment and space.

This page updated 20 March 2003; for further information contact sbritch@nmsu.edu.

Keywords:
Allonemobius socius, Allonemobius fasciatus, Salmones, Quercus, Daniel J. Howard, climate change, global warming, speciation, reinforcement, reproductive isolation, QTL, quantitative trait, allozymes, DNA, AFLP, RAPD, character displacement, electrophoresis, ecological genetics, introgression, hybridization, hybrid zone, mosaic hybrid zone, New Mexico State University, Laboratory of Ecological and Evolutionary Genetics, phylogeography, allardi, tinnulus, sparsalus, griseus, walkeri, fultoni, Eunemobius, Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout, GIS, GPS, RS, geographic information systems, global positioning system, remote sensing, spatial ecology, spatial statistics