•Natural History of Vertebrates •
Email:ggart001@ucr.edu
General Interests I am broadly interested in the evolution of form and function in vertebrates, particularly squamate reptiles. The study of adaptation has traditionally focused on the link between whole-organism performance and its consequences for organismal fitness—poor performers are poor competitors, and won’t leave as many offspring. Performance is a function of the synergistic effects of a number of sub-organismal traits including morphology, physiology, and biochemistry. These traits must evolve in tandem with performance. Performance, therefore, provides an ideal, integrative platform to study the evolution of a number of inter-related traits at several levels of analysis and to ask what the consequences of trait variation are on the fitness of organisms. Measures of locomotor performance are ideally suited for studies of morphological adaptation because locomotion, perhaps more than any other behavior, transcends the daily lives of organisms. We might therefore assume that there would be strong evolutionary pressure for organisms to develop diverse modes of locomotion for moving through numerous types of media that are at once efficient, rapid, and adjustable. For more detailed descriptions of my research interests, click here --> RESEARCH! |
