Marlene Zuk | |
---|---|
Born | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. [1] | May 20, 1956
Citizenship | United States |
Alma mater | University of California, Santa Barbara University of Michigan |
Spouse | John Rotenberry |
Awards | BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2022) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology |
Institutions | University of California, Riverside University of Minnesota |
Thesis | Sexual selection, mate choice and gregarine parasite levels in the field crickets Gryllus veletis and G. pennsylvanicus (1986) |
Marlene Zuk (born May 20, 1956) is an American evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist. She worked as professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) until she transferred to the University of Minnesota in 2012. Her studies involve sexual selection and parasites. [2]
Zuk was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania [1] and is a native of Los Angeles. [3] She became interested in insects at a young age. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, Zuk started majoring in English, but decided to switch to Biology. [4] After earning her bachelor's degree, she wrote and taught for three years. [5]
In 1982, she and W. D. Hamilton proposed the "good genes" hypothesis of sexual selection. [6] Zuk started attending the University of Michigan in 1986 and earned her Doctor of Philosophy. [5] [7] She completed her postdoctoral research at the University of New Mexico. [5] She joined the UCR faculty in 1989. [3] In April 2012, Zuk and her husband, John Rotenberry, transferred to the University of Minnesota, where they both work at its College of Biological Sciences. [4]
Zuk has received honorary doctorates from Sweden's Uppsala University (2010) and the University of Jyväskylä in Finland (2016). [8]
Zuk's research of interest deals with the evolution of sexual behavior (especially in relation to parasites), mate choice, and Animal behavior. [2] A recurring theme in Zuk's writing and lectures is feminism and women in science. [4] Zuk is critical of the paleolithic diet. [9] In 1996 Zuk was awarded a continuing grant by the National Science Foundation for an investigation into the ways that variation in females effects sexual selection and what qualities in males indicate vigor. [10]
Zuk is outspoken about promoting women in science. In 2018, Zuk published an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times. Titled, "There's nothing inherent about the fact that men outnumber women in the sciences," [11] the article countered recurring suggestions that women are underrepresented in scientific fields due to inherent preferences toward the humanities. By highlighting the inextricable relationship between nature and nurture, she points out the impossibility of attributing female underrepresentation in science to any inborn cause. Citing essential scientific integrity, she argues that until boys and girls are raised under identical circumstances one could not possibly prove any inherent female leanings towards or away from the sciences. [12]
Beginning in the early 1990s, Zuk opened avenues for new research with her field work investigating the interactions in Hawaii between the Pacific field cricket Teleogryllus oceanicus and a recently introduced parasitoid fly Ormia ochracea . Zuk recognized "a unique opportunity" to study in real time a trait for which reproductive success and survival success were in conflict. [13] The male crickets used stridulation calls to attract mates, but the calls also attracted eavesdropping female flies. These flies deposited larvae that burrowed into the callers, consuming and killing them within a few days.
Opportunities for scholars attentive to Zuk's work expanded when, in 2003, Zuk and her team found that on one Hawaiian island, Kauai, non-calling Teleogryllus oceanicus male crickets had appeared and were now abundant. [14] A single-locus mutation had altered male cricket wing development, making stridulation impossible. The conferred survival advantage under predator selection had, in fewer than 20 generations, changed the genotype, phenotype, and behavior of 90% of the island's cricket males. Zuk christened the new form "flatwing." [15] [16] Since 2006, scholars in various biological disciplines have built on Zuk's foundational work. [17] [18] [19] [20]
Her books and articles include: [2]
Zuk is a professor in the department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior in the College of Biological Sciences. She is the Associate Dean for Faculty. [2]
In 2015, Zuk was the recipient of the Edward O. Wilson Naturalist Award by the American Society of Naturalists. [21] [22]
Zuk was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017, [23] [24] and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019. [25]
The Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology named their scholarship award for outstanding oral presentation in the division of animal behavior after her. [26]
For 2022, she was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award. [27]
Parasitism is a close relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives on or inside another organism, the host, causing it some harm, and is adapted structurally to this way of life. The entomologist E. O. Wilson characterised parasites as "predators that eat prey in units of less than one". Parasites include single-celled protozoans such as the agents of malaria, sleeping sickness, and amoebic dysentery; animals such as hookworms, lice, mosquitoes, and vampire bats; fungi such as honey fungus and the agents of ringworm; and plants such as mistletoe, dodder, and the broomrapes.
The Tachinidae are a large and variable family of true flies within the insect order Diptera, with more than 8,200 known species and many more to be discovered. Over 1,300 species have been described in North America alone. Insects in this family commonly are called tachinid flies or simply tachinids. As far as is known, they all are protelean parasitoids, or occasionally parasites, of arthropods, usually other insects. The family is known from many habitats in all zoogeographical regions and is especially diverse in South America.
Cerci are paired appendages on the rear-most segments of many arthropods, including insects and symphylans. Many forms of cerci serve as sensory organs, but some serve as pinching weapons or as organs of copulation. In many insects, they simply may be functionless vestigial structures.
William H. Cade is an American biologist and entomologist, and a former president of the University of Lethbridge. He researches the role of acoustic signals in field cricket mating behaviour.
Ormia ochracea is a small yellow nocturnal fly in the family Tachinidae. It is notable for its parasitism of crickets and its exceptionally acute directional hearing. The female is attracted to the song of the male cricket and deposits larvae on or around him, as was discovered in 1975 by the zoologist William H. Cade.
Parasitoid wasps are a large group of hymenopteran superfamilies, with all but the wood wasps (Orussoidea) being in the wasp-waisted Apocrita. As parasitoids, they lay their eggs on or in the bodies of other arthropods, sooner or later causing the death of these hosts. Different species specialise in hosts from different insect orders, most often Lepidoptera, though some select beetles, flies, or bugs; the spider wasps (Pompilidae) exclusively attack spiders.
Teleogryllus oceanicus, commonly known as the Australian, Pacific or oceanic field cricket, is a cricket found across Oceania and in coastal Australia from Carnarvon in Western Australia and Rockhampton in north-east Queensland
Mate choice is one of the primary mechanisms under which evolution can occur. It is characterized by a "selective response by animals to particular stimuli" which can be observed as behavior. In other words, before an animal engages with a potential mate, they first evaluate various aspects of that mate which are indicative of quality—such as the resources or phenotypes they have—and evaluate whether or not those particular trait(s) are somehow beneficial to them. The evaluation will then incur a response of some sort.
The lek paradox is the conundrum of how additive or beneficial genetic variation is maintained in lek mating species in the face of consistent sexual selection based on female preferences. While many studies have attempted to explain how the lek paradox fits into Darwinian theory, the paradox remains. Persistent female choice for particular male trait values should erode genetic diversity in male traits and thereby remove the benefits of choice, yet choice persists. This paradox can be somewhat alleviated by the occurrence of mutations introducing potential differences, as well as the possibility that traits of interest have more or less favorable recessive alleles.
Many species have multiple sexual ornaments, whereby females select mating partners using several cues instead of only one cue. Whereas this phenomenon is self-evident and hence long recognized, adaptive explanations of why females use several instead of only one signal have been formulated relatively recently. Several hypotheses exist, but mutually exclusive tests are still lacking.
Crickets are orthopteran insects which are related to bush crickets, and, more distantly, to grasshoppers. In older literature, such as Imms, "crickets" were placed at the family level, but contemporary authorities including Otte now place them in the superfamily Grylloidea. The word has been used in combination to describe more distantly related taxa in the suborder Ensifera, such as king crickets and mole crickets.
Mary Jane West-Eberhard is an American theoretical biologist noted for arguing that phenotypic and developmental plasticity played a key role in shaping animal evolution and speciation. She is also an entomologist notable for her work on the behavior and evolution of social wasps.
Ultrasound avoidance is an escape or avoidance reflex displayed by certain animal species that are preyed upon by echolocating predators. Ultrasound avoidance is known for several groups of insects that have independently evolved mechanisms for ultrasonic hearing. Insects have evolved a variety of ultrasound-sensitive ears based upon a vibrating tympanic membrane tuned to sense the bat's echolocating calls. The ultrasonic hearing is coupled to a motor response that causes evasion of the bat during flight.
A biological ornament is a characteristic of an animal that appears to serve a decorative function rather than a utilitarian function. Many are secondary sexual characteristics, and others appear on young birds during the period when they are dependent on being fed by their parents. Ornaments are used in displays to attract mates, which may lead to the evolutionary process known as sexual selection. An animal may shake, lengthen, or spread out its ornament in order to get the attention of the opposite sex, which will in turn choose the most attractive one with which to mate. Ornaments are most often observed in males, and choosing an extravagantly ornamented male benefits females as the genes that produce the ornament will be passed on to her offspring, increasing their own reproductive fitness. As Ronald Fisher noted, the male offspring will inherit the ornament while the female offspring will inherit the preference for said ornament, which can lead to a positive feedback loop known as a Fisherian runaway. These structures serve as cues to animal sexual behaviour, that is, they are sensory signals that affect mating responses. Therefore, ornamental traits are often selected by mate choice.
Gryllus rubens, commonly known as the southeastern field cricket, is one of many cricket species known as a field cricket. It occurs throughout most of the Southeastern United States. Its northern range spans from southern Delaware to the extreme southeastern corner of Kansas, with a southern range stretching from Florida to eastern Texas.
An illegitimate receiver is an organism that intercepts another organism's signal, despite not being the signaler's intended target. In animal communication, a signal is any transfer of information from one organism to another, including visual, olfactory, and auditory signals. If the illegitimate receiver's interception of the signal is a means of finding prey, the interception is typically a fitness detriment to either the signaler or the organism meant to legitimately receive the signal, but it is a fitness advantage to the illegitimate receiver because it provides energy in the form of food. Illegitimate receivers can have important effects on the evolution of communication behaviors.
Gryllus integer, commonly known as the western trilling cricket, is one of many species of field cricket in the genus Gryllus. It is called the "triller" field cricket because its song is nearly continuous rather than broken into discrete chirps. G. integer can be found in parts of the Western United States, having been recorded from Oregon, California, Arizona and New Mexico.
Teleogryllus commodus, commonly known as the black field cricket, is a cricket species native to Australia. They are significant pests to most plants in Australia and New Zealand. T. commodus belongs to the order Orthoptera, the family Gryllidae which are characterized by wings that are folded on the side of the body, chewing mouthparts and long, thin antennae. T. commodus has the ability to learn via the recognition of rewards. They are also capable of odour recognition and thus can be taught via odour pairing.
Parasite-stress theory, or pathogen-stress theory, is a theory of human evolution proposing that parasites and diseases encountered by a species shape the development of species' values and qualities, proposed by researchers Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill.
Rohini Balakrishnan is an Indian bioacoustics expert. She is a senior Professor and Chair of the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru. Her research focuses on animal behavior through the lens of animal communication and bioacoustics.
Presumably owing to the associated mortality, with each field visit since 1991 we heard and observed fewer crickets on that island, and in 2001 only heard a single calling male, with all crickets extremely scarce in intensive searches.... Over a three day visit in 2003, although we heard none calling, crickets were far more abundant than before in their habitat of fields and lawns. Further examination revealed that virtually all Kauai males had female-like wings, lacking the normal stridulatory apparatus of file and scraper required for sound production.
The rise of flatwing morphology from negligible in the late 1990s to 91% of the population in 2004 took only 16–20 generations.
Host–parasite interactions are predicted to drive the evolution of defenses and counter-defenses.... The loss of male song in Hawaiian field crickets (Teleogryllus oceanicus) subject to fatal parasitism by eavesdropping flies (Ormia ochracea) is a textbook example of rapid evolution in one such arms race.
We capitalized on a rapidly evolving Hawaiian population of crickets (Teleogryllus oceanicus) to test hypotheses about the genomic consequences of a recent Mendelian mutation of large effect which disrupts the development of sound-producing structures on male forewings.
[T]he rapid evolution of sexually selected traits still appears to be relatively rare. The very recent evolution of a novel sexual signal in the Pacific field cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus thus offers a rare opportunity to investigate how males with recently evolved novel sexual signals fare in the context of close one-on-one courtship encounters.
Here, we take advantage of the repeated evolutionary origin and spread of flatwing crickets in multiple Hawaiian island populations to test the expected trade-off between gene flow and rapid parallel adaptation via independent mutational events....
Here we capitalize on a rapidly evolving interaction between the Pacific field cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus and the acoustically orienting parasitoid fly Ormia ochracea to understand how parasitoids initially respond to novel changes in host sexual signals.