Postdoctoral Research Associate

Job description

Description The Evolution of Sexually Selected Weapons and Shields in Coreidae (Insecta: Hemiptera) The successful candidate will investigate the evolution of weapons and shields used in male-male combat. Previous work investigating male-male combat has almost exclusively taken an offensive perspective, while the role of defense has almost been completely ignored. How well an individual is defended during a fight can determine whether that individual will win or lose. Thus, an individual’s defensive capacity is critical to their fighting success. However, almost nothing is known about why some individuals are better defended than others. Moreover, evolutionary arms-races between weapons and defensive structures are postulated to have a role in weapon diversification. Thus, our lack of knowledge about these defensive traits is also a critical obstacle to understanding how such arms-races influence the evolution and diversification of weapons. To address these gaps in knowledge, the successfully candidate will 1) take an experimental manipulation approach to determine why some individuals are better defended than others, and 2) use phylogenetic comparative methods to evaluate the cau...