Research

Coral reef fishes comprise one of the most conspicuously colorful assemblages of vertebrates on Earth. The diversity of color mechanisms and color patterns are axes of diversity to consider within speciation and evolutionary history, however the overall diversity has never been quantified broadly across fishes. Although previous studies have linked diversity of color and color patterns in reef fish to factors ranging from sexual selection and communication with conspecifics to predator-prey interactions, these hypotheses have not been tested in a comparative macroevolutionary framework. While studies of color pattern from the species to family level allow us to make inferences about specific groups, assessing the evolution of color pattern across the fish tree brings insight into how color and color pattern as axes of diversity factor into patterns of species distribution and speciation. I intend to quantify diversity of color mechanisms and patterns across reef-associated acanthomorphs, which represent over 90% of reef fishes and encompass a wide range of morphological, ecological, behavioral, and trophic diversity. This research will apply phylogenetic comparative methods to different measures of reef fish color data, morphological data, species distribution data, ecological data, and behavioral classifications to test multiple hypotheses within an evolutionary framework. The aim of my research is to determine how and when diversity in color and color patterns was assembled at different comparative phylogenetic scales.

Here are the projects I am currently working on for my dissertation:

• The role of eyespots in the evolution of defensive traits (manuscript in prep)

• Systematically quantifying discrete color classes in organisms

• How color and pattern diversity in reef fishes relates to broad categorizations of ecology

• Biographic patterns of color and pattern diversity across marine fishes