Lab members, present and past

Current

Postdocs

Christopher Smith

PhD -- Harvard University (Brian Farrell)

Chris has worked on the systematics and phylogeography of Moneilema, a group of flightless cerambycid beetles that feed on Opuntia cacti throughout much of the North American deserts. His dissertation work reconstructs both deep and recent history for the organisms, showing how recurring episodes of climate/vegetation change have affected ranges and gene flow in these sedentary organisms. He is working on our projects testing predictions about microevolutionary processes driving diversifying coevolution in the yucca-yucca moth association.

e-mail: csmith@uidaho.edu

Graduate students

William Godsoe

BS -- Guelph University

William arrived at UI having trained as an undergraduate with Anurag Agrawal, Steve Heard, and Paul Hebert. He has a broad background in natural history, and a passion for biological statistics and population genetics. His emerging dissertation project deals with the coevolutionary consequences on diversification of intraspecifc herbivore x habitat effects in a plant species with wide habitat range. William will be doing both theoretical and empirical studies. He is also deeply involved with a project addressing divesification, coevolution, and history of joshua tree (Yucca brevifolia) and its pollinators.

e-mail: gods9193@uidaho.edu

Jeremy Yoder (http://www.jeremybyoder.com/)

B.S. -- Eastern Mennonite University

Jeremy completed an internship with The Nature Conservancy before arriving at Idaho, working on a project related to composition, structure, and conservation of eastern stream habitats. Jeremy plans to use empirical and modelling approaches to ask questions about mechanisms and patterns of coevolution

e-mail: yode8881@uidaho.edu

Undergraduate students

Shantel Tank

Shantel, a double-major in biology and secondary education, is involved with several aspects of the major general lab model of joshua trees and their associated yucca moths. Her focus thus far has been on the genetic structure of pollinators, and the project will expand to include comparative analyses of non-pollinating moths that coexist with the pollinators on the joshua trees.

Alumni

Postdoctoral associates

David Althoff

MS, PhD -- Washington State University (John Thompson)

Dave has a broad interest in tritrophic interactions and how they affect community structure on ecological and evolutionary time scales. During his tenure in the lab thus far, Dave has been central in experimental ecological work in Florida, testing hypotheses about the reversal of mutualism in yucca moths. He has also developed a research program using suites of molecular data sets in phylogeographic studies to explore how species interactions and geography have affected the evolutionary histories of coexisting herbivores and their natural enemies on yuccas. These tools are now being employed in studies of the interactive roles of host biology and geography in mediating specialization in parasitic wasps.

Dave joined our lab in 1998, and took up an adjunct faculty position at Syracuse University in 2005.

e-mail: dalthoff@uidaho.edu

Glenn Svensson

PhD -- Lund University, Sweden (Christer Löfstedt)

Glenn is a chemical ecologist who studied disruption of odor-mediated behaviors in moths using olfactory and acoustic cues in his dissertation. He was a joint postdoc with us and floral scent biologist Rob Raguso at University of South Carolina in 2003-2005, using chemoanalytical and GC-EAD techniques to test hypotheses about intra- and interspecific evolution of olfactory cues used by male and female yucca moths and about patterns of plant volatile evolution in the yuccas in general. He is now a research associate in the dept of Chemical Ecology at Lund University, Sweden.

E-mail: glenn.svensson@ekol.lu.se

Jim Leebens-Mack

PhD -- Univ of Texas, Austin (Brook Milligan)

Jim was involved with many aspects of yucca moth phylogenetics, including diversification and evolution of cheating in the moths, population genetics of host-specific moths across a host hybrid zone, and the utility of plant-insect associations in historical plant biogeography, He is now focusing on areas broadly circumscribed as phylogenomic approaches to explore the ecological, genetic and developmental processes that contribute to phenotypic diversification and speciation. We continue collaborative research developing plant and insect phylogenies that will be used together with morphological data to assess the component of coevolution on specific traits.

e-mail:jleebensmack@plantbio.uga.edu

homepage: http://www.plantbio.uga.edu/~jleebensmack/JLMmain.html

Deborah Marr

Ph.D. -- Indiana University (Lynda Delph)

Deb was involved in a series of experiments exploring the mechanistic basis and evolutionary origins of selective abscission in yucca flowers. She also led a project that explored how pollinator-cheater larval interactions inside yucca fruits affect population dynamics and persistence of cheaters in obligate mutualisms. She was also deeply involved in work on yuccas and yucca moths that we did as a lab at Archbold Biological Station in central Florida. Deb is now a faculty member at the University of Indiana ≠ South Bend.

E-mail: dmarr@iusb.edu

Homepage: http://mypage.iusb.edu/~dmarr/HomePage.html

Graduate students

Chad Huth -- MS 1994

Chad studied several aspects of selective flower abscission in yuccas as a mechanism stabilizing the mutualism. The most prominent result was the documentation of selective abscission of heavily moth-infested flowers, published in Nature. He was also actively involved in work on moth behavior and the demonstration that some yucca moths deposit host marking pheromones.

Mary Ann Feist -- MS 1995

Mary Ann studied population genetics in Yucca glauca in a prairie site in western Nebraska, showing that the species has remarkably high genetic diversity. She also planned to study aspects of parentage in yucca seeds, and did lots and lots of pollinations, only to discover the perils of field work...herbivorous insects destroyed virtually all fruits in her study site, and she was left with a half dozen intact seeds from a few fruits. Oh, and she had to change field site at the last moment when the Mississippi River flooded and cut off her first study site. Mary Ann now works as a botanist for the Illinois Natural History Survey, is completing a PhD in plant systematics with Steve Downie at Univ of Illlinois-Champaign/Urbana, and is heavily involved in the ATBI (All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory) for Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

E-mail: mfeist@mail.inhs.uiuc.edu

Joshua Groman -- MS 1999

Josh was primarily involved in work on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. He used a bogus yucca moth that recently has expanded its diet to include an introduced species of yucca to ask whether there was evidence of rapid host race formation. He documented both genetic evidence, phenological data, and morphological evidence showing that a new host race has emerged in the last few hundred years. The work was published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. As an intern project, Josh also measured relative contribution of different pollinator guilds (nocturnal/diurnal) in an agave.

Josh received a PhD in human genetics at Johns Hopkins University, studying cystic fibrosis (and learning to use a necktie); he is published in the New England Journal of Medicine, PNAS, and other journals. A founder of the Hopkins Biotech Network, he is now a management consultant at MEDACorp, consulting for life sciences and pharmaceutical companies.

E-mail: jgroman@jhmi.edu

Beau Crabb -- MS 2002

Beau had done studies of tritrophic interactions as an undergraduate with Bob Fritz at Vassar, and came primed to tackle related issues in yuccas as a grad student. During two years of field work in Big Bend National Park, he tested a hypothesis that cheating moth-killer yuccas exist within one of the resident yucca species, asked whether a specialized parasitoid that kills pollinator larvae prematurely may be an indirect mutualist of the yuccas, and tested whether those parasitoids could use olfactory cues to recognize yucca fruits that contained feeding moth larvae.

E-mail: bamadeus2k1@yahoo.com

Kari Segraves -- PhD 2003

MS -- Washington State University (John Thompson)

Kari studied variation in plant ploidy levels and its role in plant-pollinator interactions for her M.S. degree. During her PhD training she has been involved in extensive phylogeographic work on several groups of yucca moths. Her dissertation addresses the role of extrinsic factors in controlling partcipants in a yucca-yucca moth association (soon to appear in Ecology), interactive use of phylogeography and experimental behavioral ecology in testing hypotheses of mutualism reversal in yucca moths, and population genetic/morphomtric approaches to analyzing the historical role of coevolution in driving yucca and yucca moth evolution. Kari now holds an NSF postdoctoral fellowship in bioinformatics, testing models of Ehrlich-Raven coevolution in the lab of Jack Sullivan here at the U of Idaho.

Kari took up a faculty position at Syracuse University in fall 2005, and you can read all about her lab at

Homepage: http://biology.syr.edu/segraves/index.html.

E-mail: ksegrave@syr.edu

Visiting graduate student

Yudai Okuyama, Kyoto University

Yudai is performing studies of phylogeny and diversification, esp. as driven by pollination biology in Mitella and associatad genera of Saxifragacae. He visited the lab in 2004 and 2005 to perform comparative studies of North American taxa.

Undergraduates

Kati K‰rkk‰inen

On left, 1985; right, 2003

Kati worked for two years with me on the pollination dynamics between Trollius europaeus and their obligate seed-eating fly pollinators -- work done at the Oulanka Biological Station on the Arctic circle in northern Finland. She completed a PhD in plant evolutionary genetics on maternal effects and inbreeding in pines with Outi Savolainen at the University of Oulu, and now holds a professorship in forest genetics at the Finnish Forest Research Institute at the Vantaa Research Center near Helsinki.

E-mail: Katri.Karkkainen@metla.fi

Allyson Ouzts

Allyson did some of the first work on differential persistence of pollinator and cheater yucca moths as a function of host plant population size in a patchy landscape. She received an M.S. in marine biology from Auburn University. She now works for the Sustainable Fisheries division of NOAA, being responsible for the salmonid recovery program in part of the Columbia River.

E-mail: allyson.ouzts@noaa.gov

Marc Brock

Marc was involved with an early project looking at pollinator population genetics across a contact zones between two yucca species at the Mojave/Sonaran desert transition. We used DGGE to track both mt and nNDA markers, and the results were published in Evolution. Mark then proceeded with astudy of the posible role of pollinator-cheater larval competition inside yucca fruits in mediating the population dynamics. The results have since been published in Oecologia. Mark completed a PhD on extinction by introgression between native and exotic dandelions with Candi Galen at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is now a postdoc in Cynthia Weinig's lab at the University of Minnesota.

E-mail: brock090@umn.edu

U2

Andrea Farley

Andrea worked with us on ontogeny of selective abscission in several close relatives of yuccas in Nashville in 1995. She subsequently got an M.S. in ecology & environmental science at Texas A&M, and has recently been employed by USR Corp. that prepares EIS, especially developing rapid bioinventory work in aquatic communities in Maryland as a method of optimizing habitat restoration and conservation.

Rachel Roberts

Rachel worked as an REU student for a summer, studying patterns of selective abscission in close relatives of yuccas. Following graduation, she entered a graduate program in Language Technologies at Carnegie-Mellon University. She is also a research assistant in a dependable-systems laboratory, that works on smoothing the human-computer interface.

Lindsey Elms

Lindsey spent a summer with us while she was an undergrad at Oberlin College, working primarily on an experiment that intended to identify the mechanistic basis of selective abscission of yucca flowers in response to oviposition by yucca moths. Using a dummy ovipositor, she and Deb Marr spent a flowering season at Vanderbilt doing an experiment just about to be published. Lindsey is planning to continue graduate work in ecology.

Joel McGlothlin

Joel worked with us in Florida at the Archbold Biological Station, being involved in behavioral experiments with yucca moths. A recipient of the highest medal for scholarly achievements when he graduated from Vanderbilt, he is now a graduate student in Ellen Ketterson's lab at Indiana University where he studies sexual selection in birds.

E-mail: jmcgloth@indiana.edu

Homepage: http://www.indiana.edu/~kettlab/joel_mcglothlin.html

Rachel Forbes

Rachel worked with us in Florida at the Archbold Biological Station, being involved in behavioral experiments and plant ecological studies with yucca moths. She is now a physician.

Nicole Lang

Nicki worked with us in Florida at the Archbold Biological Station, being involved in behavioral experiments and plant ecological studies with yucca moths; she has special skills in GIS that came of use in studies of patchiness in resource distribution and its effect on yucca reproductive success. She recently completed an M.S. degree in Charlie Halpern's lab at the Univ of Washington, working on a project investigating ecology and restoration of montane meadows in the Oregon Cascade mountains. Here's the thesis.

Angela Stevenson

Angie worked on a project using phylogenetic, population genetic, and morphometric data to explore patterns of specialization and incipient speciation in a cheater yucca moth with an unusually broad host range. Her project was funded by an NSF REU grant and by a competitive in-house grant for undergraduate research. She is now taking a breather at Cornell from her studies, being a tech in Kelly Zamudio's lab, and plans to pursue graduate training in evolutionary ecology.