Sara's Research Interests

I am a first-year Zoology/EEBB Ph.D. student in Dr. Tom Getty’s lab. I am interested in how individuals maximize their inclusive fitness by balancing cooperation and competition when interacting with their kin. Maximizing inclusive fitness requires individuals to avoid directly competing with kin as much as possible, but this becomes more difficult in systems where interacting with kin cannot be avoided. Frog and toad tadpoles are one such case, as many species form aggregations, often comprised of siblings, before they are capable of leaving ponds. When resources are limited, larger tadpoles of many species have been seen to inhibit the growth of smaller individuals through the use of chemical signals; there is some evidence, however, of smaller tadpoles performing better when grouped with siblings rather than non-kin, even under poorer conditions, suggesting that siblings respond to one another’s signals in a way that maximizes inclusive and individual fitness for everyone. I plan to use two species that differ in kin-aggregating tendencies to test the hypothesis that kin-aggregating species will respond to sibling signals by limiting growth rate when a sibling’s marginal fitness benefits are greater, whereas species that do not exhibit kin preferences will show no change in competitive behavior regardless of the situation.