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I'm a behavioral ecologist studying animal behavior in the context of evolution. We assume that behaviors, like other aspects of organisms, evolve to solve problems.

One of the areas I am interested in involves sexual organisms and how males and females resolve some of the conflicting interests that are inherent in their biology.

A project I'm currently working in is the re-examination of some classic work that was conducted in the 1940s by an English biologist named Angus John Bateman. He was the first to provide empirical data that supported many of the ideas Charles Darwin had regarding something called sexual selection, which was Darwin's second big contribution to our understanding of biology.

This is the idea that animals have certain exaggerated traits that evolve not because they confer any survival advantages — in fact in many cases these traits have the opposite effect — but rather because they provide advantages in mating success. This could be manifested in elaborate weaponry or ornamentation.  The peacock is a classic example of this.

The original thinking by Bateman was that there were universal sex roles; that males were the competitive and indiscriminate sex and that females were more choosy and coy. This was a good start but since the 1990s there has been a renewed interest in sexual selection theory in that studies have shown that sexuals are much more complex and flexible; females can be very competitive and males can be choosy.

I've worked with spiders for a long period of time and I'm really interested in looking at some of the underlying factors that affect sexual behaviours. It's something that a lot of people make assumptions about yet has not been well explored.

Sexual traits do have evolutionarily meaningful costs and our work aims to define these. For instance there is an assumption that an animal going through a courtship display will expend a significant amount of energy and this can be viewed as costly. However, by eating a little extra food this energy can be replaced.  So what we're interested in, for instance, is whether courtship behavior attracts predators. This would have a very real potential cost to the animal.

We conducted lab experiments with a common species of male wolf spider that court females by raising their front leg. It showed that females have preferences for males that court at very high rates. Females mating with these males produce egg sacks sooner, with a shorter development time and with the offspring surviving longer, as opposed to females that were forced to mate with males that courted at low rates. So these are the kind of indirect benefits that we're looking at.

One of the more exciting things about doing pure research is that a lot of times you take small steps, and with each step it can open up a whole bunch of new avenues that you haven't thought about before. I'm a question-driven biologist so that's really what I enjoy.