Joseph Travis, Ph.D - US grants

Local populations of a species are often considered to be genetically differentiated in response to local differences in environmental factors that produce divergent forces of natural selection. Most demonstrations of such "adaptive differentiation" are actually not based on local populations but are instead focused on populations that are separated by large geographic distances or are completely unconnected by gene flow. Thus the scale at which adaptive differentiation can occur remains to be delineated. Prior work by Dr. Travis has shown extensive local differentiation in apparent response to physical factors that vary across locations. The next phase of the research will (1) examine the detailed nature of the genetic differences and (2) test the hypotheses for how the physical factors in the environment generate divergent forces of natural selection.

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This study will examine the environmentally-induced flexibility in the life history of the sailfin molly. It is obvious that almost any animal's life history is malleable by environmental effects such as temperature or food level. However, two aspects of that malleability are not well understood. First, there is increasing evidence that the pattern of environmental sensitivity varies among different populations of the same species. Second, it is unclear whether natural selection has molded those different patterns of sensitivity and, if it has, how it has done so. These two basic questions will be addressed by this research. There are several ways in which the lessons from this study may be applied to other problems. First, conservation biology is focusing increasingly on how to restore viable populations of a species to an area from which it has been extirpated. This work will help document how "interchangeable" are individuals from different populations of the same species and thereby whether it is ever advisable to draw colonists from a population elsewhere in the species' range. Second, one of the major aspects of life history of this fish is its accrual and use of fat stores. This work will examine the genetic and environmental control of fat accrual and may lead to the use of fish models instead of mice as a less expensive system for studying some aspects of the control of fat metabolism.//

This project is a one year planning program that will lead to the submission of a proposal from Florida State University for a Teacher Enhancement Institute to serve high school biology teachers from the state of Florida. The planning process will be facilitated by a Planning Committee with representation from all segments of the Florida biology education community. Cost sharing equals 33% of the NSF award.

We are proposing to purchase a number of items of equipment and software that will enhance the capabilities and services of our DNA Sequencing Core Facility by upgrading our Applied Biosystems 373A Electrophoresis Unit (= automated sequencer) and its associated equipment and providing the users with enhanced access to data-analysis work stations. The hardware includes a five-filter wheel (to permit sequencing with T7 DNA polymerase), a liner upgrade (to permit the option of using several variable well-to-read gel plates), vertical agarose gel plates (to facilitate analysis of 2-3 kb-fragments and random amplified polymorphic DNA), and computer equipment (to increase analytical speed and accommodate multiple users). The software includes material to facilitate sequence alignment, increase the speed of scoring fragments, and create consensus sequences. The enhancements will serve a diversity of research projects in different disciplines, from phylogenetic reconstructions (cyanobacteria from extreme environments, the major crustacean lineages) to examinations of gene expression (flagellar regeneration in Chlamydomonas, acclimatory change in muscle tissue) to the determination of reproductive patterns in natural populations (mating in livebearing fishes). The upgrade will expand the range of applications that the facility can offer and permit more rapid sample analysis, thereby enabling users from several disciplines to expand readily the scope of their work and to increase their productivity.

9902312
Travis & Horth

The goal of this project is to identify how a rare, genetically controlled, male body color pattern variant is maintained in many natural populations of mosquitofish, Gambusia holbrooki. This persistence is striking because males have only a single copy of the color-determining gene and theory suggests that this type of variation should not readily persist in nature. This study will address: (1) how water temperature may affect the expression of body color so as to mask the gene that causes melanism and make silver males appear more common than they really are; (2) how silver and melanic males interact with each other and with females; and (3) whether silver and melanic males differ in the number of offspring they sire when they compete for females, using behavioral observations and controlled genetic crosses.

The study addresses a fundamental gap between theory and empirical pattern. In theory, single-copy genes, or haploids, ought not to exhibit much genetic variation in nature; in practice, variations like this one are common. It also addresses a novel feature of natural genetic variation, that of temperature-dependent expression and whether that expression is actually masking more genetic variation than is apparent. The way in which genetic variation is expressed in different thermal environments is a key issue in understanding how animals will respond to global change and whether that response will be merely ecological or also evolutionary.











H:\popbio\abstracts\fy1999\9902312 (Travis abstract)

DEB 9903925:

DENSITY-DEPENDENT LIFE-HISTORY EVOLUTION IN THE LEAST KILLIFISH,

HETERANDRIA FORMOSA (PISCES: POECILIIDAE)


PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Joseph Travis, Florida State University


ABSTRACT


This project will test whether density-dependent natural selection (natural selection that operates differently at different levels of crowding) is responsible for a major life-history divergence in a small north Florida fish. One facet of the work will examine long-term numerical dynamics of two fish populations and the species in their communities. The other facet will be an experimental study of whether natural selection at different levels of crowding will re-sort the genes responsible for different life histories in different populations.

Density-dependent selection for life histories, the idea that populations that experience characteristically different regimes of crowding ought to exhibit characteristically different life histories, is fundamental to population biology. The concept was once hypothesized to account for much natural life-history diversity; it has also been the foundation for ideas about whether stable population dynamics can evolve or whether exploitation of fisheries by reducing fish density will alter the life history of the fishery species. Yet the empirical support for the entire concept is weak and circumscribed. This study will develop a model system from natural populations for testing the concept and understanding how it works (if indeed it does) and how it can be used in a variety of applications.

Travis
0073896


This project will discern the evolutionary lability of the visual system in the bluefin killifish. Males exhibit one of several different color patterns. Lighting conditions (e.g. water clarity, tree cover) are good predictors of the relative abundance of male color morphs within a population. Because these color patterns are used in signaling females, the visual system might vary among populations so that it mitigates the color schemes used by males in each population. This project will quantify the pattern of variation in vision physiology across populations with different lighting regimes and the amount of variation within populations attributable to genetics, environment, and their interactions. Experiments will be performed which examine the effect of male color patterns on animal behavior and the response of vision physiology to artificial selection.

The ultimate objective of this study is to determine whether natural selection can act on sensory systems or whether sensory systems are invariant (and, therefore acts as a constraint to natural selection). This question is central to many debates in biology (e.g. evolution of senescence, genome size, plasticity). If physiology can readily respond to selection, predictions can be made as to what should happen to populations over time with models involving few constraints due to a lack of genetic variation. If, however, physiology is invariant, then these constraints must be incorporated into our models - potentially resulting in drastically different predictions.

Males of many species possess extravagant, brightly colored structures that are costly to produce and that increase their likelihood of being seen and eaten by predators. One of the great problems of evolutionary biology is understanding why females select for such extravagant traits in males. The "sensory bias hypothesis" states that female mating preferences are by-products of natural selection on the sensory system. Under this hypothesis, strong natural selection on animals to find food, avoid predators, and find proper habitats results in indirect selection on mating preferences. The fundamental assumption of this hypothesis is that the genes (and neurological pathways) that affect foraging preferences also affect mating preferences. This project will determine the extent to which different behaviors that share a common sensory system can evolve independently. The objective of the study will be to determine if behaviors share a common sensory system and/or does variation in the sensory system lead to variation in behavior. To address these questions, large amounts of phenotypic variation in visual properties will be generated and multiple aspects of behavior will be measured using the bluefin killifish, Lucania goodei, a species previously demonstrated to have large amounts of variation in visual properties both within and between populations.
Broader Impacts: The study will provide the graduate student and several undergraduates experience with a variety of techniques drawn from many disciplines. This project involves the collaboration of evolutionary biologists and molecular biologists/vision physiologists that will help build connections between the evolutionary biology group within the Biological Science Department and other groups, particularly the university-wide Program in Neuroscience. The project should demonstrate that studying natural variation in vision physiology is a worthwhile endeavor, while developing further insights into the evolution of vision physiology.

It is traditionally assumed that ecology shapes how organisms evolve but that evolutionary change within a species is too slow to affect ecology. However, it has recently been shown that evolution can be rapid, possibly rapid enough to shape ecological interactions. This project will be the first to experimentally evaluate the feedback between evolution and ecology in a natural setting. The focal ecosystem is streams in Trinidad inhabited by guppies, since rapid evolution has already been documented in these fish. Guppies will be introduced from sites where they co-occur with many predators to streams where only one predator, Rivulus, exists, then evaluate ecological and co-evolutionary interactions that result. Rivulus prey on guppies, but guppies also prey on Rivulus and the two fish species compete. This project will: 1) evaluate population dynamics, resource utilization, and evolution of Rivulus and the guppies, 2) quantify impacts of guppies and Rivulus on the stream ecosystem and 3) develop new theory to link ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Additional experiments in natural streams and artificial channels will define the cause/effect relationships. Methods include molecular genetic, mark-recapture, and laboratory studies to assess the evolution of guppies and Rivulus, and ecosystem studies to quantify how the structure and function of streams changes in concert with evolution of introduced guppies.

This research will develop a conceptual framework that can be applied to any ecosystem and is relevant to conservation biology and the management of exploited populations. For example, commercial fishing often results in fish which are smaller and younger than previous generations. This problem has been studied primarily without regard to the impact of evolution, yet evolutionary processes may be at work. Incorporating evolution and eco-evolutionary interactions will enable us to better understand and solve such problems. This award will also support training for dozens of undergraduates, including visiting interns from minority institutions, plus at least seven graduate and five post-doctoral students. This is a highly collaborative, interdisciplinary, multi-institutional project led by David Reznick at the University of California-Riverside and including sub-awards to: Colorado State (Cameron Ghalambor), Cornell University (Alex Flecker), Florida State University (Joseph Travis), North Carolina State University (Jim Gilliam), University of Georgia (Catherine Pringle), University of Maine ( Michael Kinnison), Sienna College (Douglas Fraser), University of Miami (Don deAngelis), University of Arizona (Regis Ferriere), and University of Nebraska (Steve Thomas)

When mothers provide nutrition for offspring throughout gestation, offspring and mother have conflicting interests. Mothers ought to distribute nutrition evenly to all offspring, but each offspring ought to coerce as much nutrition as possible for itself. This project will examine whether different levels of conflict, produced by different levels of relatedness within a mother?s brood, can account for the vastly different levels of maternal investment in offspring seen in nature and for different patterns of gene expression during gestation in different populations. The project will also examine whether this conflict can be ameliorated by enhancing the nutrition available to mothers, and whether this conflict accounts for the high number of inviable embryos observed in crosses between individuals from different populations.

The conflicting interests of mothers and offspring are postulated to be responsible for features such as the mammalian placenta, genetic imprinting, and the rapid diversification of live-bearing animals. This project will address several of these postulated connections in the same system and thereby illuminate whether one process can offer a unifying explanation for many seemingly disparate features in nature. It will also provide training opportunities for high schoolers, teachers, undergraduates, and a postdoctoral fellow, including groups under-represented in science.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

The forty-two Noyce Scholars recruited into this project are benefiting from a newly instituted program resulting from a revamping of three separate science and mathematics secondary teacher preparation programs at Florida State University. It is modeled after the U-Teach Program at the University of Texas Austin. Two school districts, Gadsden County and Leon County, and the Tallahassee Community College are partnering with FSU to ensure a strong recruiting base and appropriate school experiences for the Scholars.

Intellectual Merit: In addition to the strong science and mathematics background the Noyce Scholars have, the program is designed to produce teachers with special skills in working with districts with special needs and to analyze how best to accomplish this. Mentors work with the Scholars from the beginning of their entry into the program to ensure that students get appropriate positive experiences and have an opportunity to reflect on and learn from those experiences. The program includes workshops and seminars for the Scholars that highlight some of the challenges they will encounter in high needs districts and how best to meet these challenges.

Broader Impacts: In addition to the impact of the Scholars on the schools and students they will work with, through a new teacher induction program, special mentors will work with the Noyce Scholars after graduation to create an ongoing community devoted to addressing and meeting the challenges encountered in high needs school districts.

Evolution is a rapid process that can be studied experimentally in natural populations, yet we know much more about evolution as the ultimate cause of change over time than we do about how it works on a day to day basis. This study will reveal how and why evolution does or does not happen by quantifying the different factors that can contribute to the way organisms can change over time. The investigators are studying evolution by transplanting guppies from a portion of a stream in Trinidad where guppies co-occur with predators and sustain high mortality rates, into four headwater streams that were previously guppy-free and predator free. Prior research demonstrated that the lower mortality risk in such environments causes the evolution of life histories (maturity, number of offspring produced, lifespan) and other attributes (male coloration, courtship behavior, neuromuscular performance) within two to ten years. The current experiments extend that work by reconstructing the pedigrees of the evolving populations and by quantify differences among individuals in reproductive success, thus partitioning change over time into nongenetic (environmental or maternal effects) and genetic effects.

The project will involve the participation of many undergraduate and graduate students, and continued outreach through a public website (cnas.ucr.edu/guppy) and in Trinidad. The project also strengthens international collaborations with scientists in Germany.

For decades biologists have struggled to determine whether and when individual behavior is influenced more by "nature" (genes) or "nurture" (social environment). While both are known to matter, emerging research suggests that "nature" and "nurture" are actually complex phenomena that are frequently difficult to disentangle. This question becomes even more complex when individuals are part of a social group. Therefore the goal of this project is to understand how social groups behave toward individuals with different sets of genes and how individuals with different genes might respond differently to the same social cues. One way to make this problem more tractable is to use tightly controlled experiments with an animal species in which specific behavioral differences are regulated by a single gene. The proposed research will use two genetically determined color forms of male mosquitofish that differ in the amount of aggression they display toward other members of their group. The experiments will determine how group composition affects the behavior of juvenile and adult fish. The studies will answer critical questions of the interaction between individuals and groups, such as how does living in a "high aggression" group affect the health and behavior of a juvenile fish, and does any effect of "high" vs. "low" aggression depend on the juvenile's own genetic makeup or is it regulated primarily by the social environment?

Upon publication data will be stored and available on DRYAD (datadryad.org. Results of these experiments will be broadly useful in understanding the factors that influence aggression and other social behavior in animals, including humans. In addition, the project will stimulate teaching and learning, increase research opportunities for students from underrepresented groups, and contribute to public understanding of science. The project will support the training of one female Ph.D. student, and will involve undergraduates from under-represented groups. The investigators will also develop a workshop on animal social behavior and genetics for Florida secondary school teachers as part of a funded "BioScopes" project. The workshop will consist of lectures and "hands-on" activities that can be adapted to the teachers' classrooms.

Through funding from the National Science Foundation's Robert Noyce Program, this Noyce Scholarship Track Phase II project will address the established and growing national need to improve quantity and increase quality of the teaching workforce in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). With the understanding that there is a significant opportunity gap for students from high needs schools compared to students from more affluent schools, Florida State University (FSU) will work closely with partner insitutions, (which include five high needs school districts, Tallahassee Community College, and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory), to address and help close this gap. In particular, the Project Team from FSU will build on lessons learned from its Phase I project and collaborate with its internal partners and partner institutions to support new teachers and attract, prepare, and support future teachers to have the background and resources to teach well, specifically with a focus on effective and reformed science and mathematics teaching in high needs middle and high school settings. The project will support a total of one hundred ten (110) potential new teachers through internships or scholarships. To foster networking and deeper understanding of needs, the multidisciplinary community associated with this project (including STEM and education faculty, interns, graduates, mentors, and teachers) will meet annually in a STEM Equity Conference. A focus of this conference will be on the various issues related to STEM instruction in high needs settings.

For recruitment, the program will offer seventy-five (75)internships through which STEM majors will explore teaching through participating in outreach that, under the guidance of a STEM faculty, will engage K-12 students from high needs settings. A comprehensive teacher preparation program will be provided for the thirty-five (35) undergraduate Noyce scholars pursuing STEM teaching. These scholars will be involved in an ongoing series of activities under the guidance of partner mentors; they will learn to navigate the difficulties associated with engaging high needs students in ambitious instruction that will be rich in STEM practices and guided by research. For support after these students graduate and receive a teaching position in a high needs school, face-to-face and virtual activities will be provided to assist them in understanding their school sites, accessing necessary resources, and honing their instruction to be both challenging and effective for their students. In addition to providing opportunities, content and pedagogical education, and support for Noyce interns and scholars, this Phase II project will feature research designed to identify and explore: (i) the dispositions and beliefs that position pre-service and novice teachers for success in delivering ambitious STEM instruction; (ii) the program supports needed to assist those novice teachers; and (iii) the school contexts that best support novices in their first years of work. Using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) as the analytical approach, investigators will analyze data from surveys, interviews, and classroom observations to move toward quantification of possible relationships between effect, belief, and practice. In turn, this research will allow results from the project to inform the efforts of others involved in the recruitment, preparation, and support of novice STEM teachers.

How do two species coexist when each has a negative impact on the other? When a new species invades a habitat, how can we predict whether it will coexist with the native species, drive one or more of them extinct, or be driven to extinction itself by the natives? This research will investigate whether coexistence is an evolved property of species interactions. This will happen if species that could not coexist on first contact can act as agents of natural selection on each other's features in a way that enables them to evolve rapidly to coexist. Understanding when and how this evolution occurs can have a profound effect on our ability to predict the results of invasions, species re-stocking, and habitat alteration on biodiversity. This research will engage undergraduate researchers, as well as engaging the public with an outreach website.

This research focuses on one of the most challenging of species interactions, which occurs when the adults of two species compete with each other for food but each preys on juveniles of the other. This research will examine how Hart's killifish and Trinidadian guppies, which interact in this manner, somehow coexist in higher elevation streams in Trinidad. Typically, guppies encounter killifish when guppies invade locations that have held only killifish. This research exploits the fact that comparisons can be made among killifish populations that coexist with guppies and populations that have never encountered guppies, along with comparisons between guppy populations that have not invaded killifish-only locations, populations that have been introduced into those locations in recent experiments, and populations that have coexisted with killifish for decades. The work includes experiments in artificial streams that mix and match these populations to examine how fitness of each species depends on the combinations of its own genetic background and that of the other species. It also includes experiments in natural pools that remove one species to measure its net effect on the other. The researchers will also be documenting the fates of guppies and killifish in experimental introductions to assess how much evolution is actually occurring. There will also be laboratory experiments that pair individuals of different body sizes within and among species to understand how competition and predation depend on relative body sizes of interacting individuals. Finally, the research will synthesize these results with computational models that describe the ecological and evolutionary trajectories, which can be used as tools for understanding the fate of biodiversity in a variety of contexts.

This Noyce Track 4 project will investigate how features of STEM teacher preparation programs contribute to instructional quality and teacher persistence of beginning STEM teachers in high-need schools. Teachers are inequitably distributed across schools, where high-need schools have higher teacher turnover rates, teachers with fewer educational credentials, and teachers with less experience. Skilled STEM teachers are more important than ever because of the increased rigor of new standards in science and mathematics, and the growing need for a well-prepared STEM workforce. Although teacher effectiveness increases over time, because high-need schools tend to have more inexperienced teachers, it is imperative that new STEM teachers enter the classroom prepared to deliver quality instruction, and that they persist in those schools as they improve. Findings from this study have the potential to: a) identify program features that are essential to the production of effective, rigorous STEM teachers that persist in high-need settings; and b) provide schools with specific coursework and field experiences to look for as they hire new teachers.

The goal of this project is to establish correlations between features of STEM teacher preparation and induction programs and beginning STEM teachers' instructional quality and persistence over the first three years of their teaching careers. The sample for the study consists of over 100 first year teachers prepared across seven geographically dispersed (CA, CO, FL, NC, NJ, NY) Noyce Scholarship programs who are teaching in high-need schools. Data from 6 task assignments and associated student work samples in science and mathematics will be used to assess the quality of teachers' instruction, specifically the academic rigor and clear expectations they present to their students. Using both linear regression and HLM, the project will investigate the relationships between teacher preparation program coursework, field experiences, induction supports, and quality of instruction. Additionally, using logistic regression, the investigators will examine the relationships between these features of preparation and induction and the likelihood of teachers persisting past their Noyce commitment into their third year of teaching. Finally, also using logistic regression, the project will investigate whether the quality of teachers' instruction is associated with their likelihood of persisting past their Noyce commitment. There is a substantial gap in the research literature regarding the relationships between teacher preparation and induction and the quality of teachers' instruction. This study aims to contribute research-based knowledge to this issue, as well as to provide guidance on specific areas where teacher preparation programs can focus program improvement efforts. This project will also form the foundation for future quasi-experimental research that focuses on significant features of preparation and induction.

Evolutionary biologists study the diversity of life on our planet and how it has been generated. One particularly important question is the diversity between sexes. While males and females are different in obvious ways related to reproduction, they also differ in other features. These additional differences are puzzling because the sexes share nearly all of their genes, and this suggests that different forms of some of those genes must be found in males and females. These differences should create a conflict between genes favored in females and genes favored in males. This research is looking for evidence of that conflict and, more importantly, whether that conflict is an unavoidable feature of having two sexes. The research will examine how males and females of the Trinidadian guppy evolve in response to a new environment. It will take advantage of an eight-year experimental study of evolution to ask if the conflict between sexes has been visible from the start or whether it emerges only after both sexes have adapted to the major features of a novel environment. Outreach to the public and K-12 students will occur as part of this project, and undergraduates from underrepresented groups will be involved in the research.
 
The strength and direction of natural selection on phenotypic variation is not equal among all individuals within a population. In particular, genetic correlations between the sexes can produce intralocus sexual conflicts when selection acts antagonistically between males and females.  Recent work has shed light on the evolutionary constraint that sexually antagonistic selection can produce, but its role in the general process of adaptation remains unclear. Theory suggests that intralocus sexual conflict will be minimal in a population adapting to a novel environment and will emerge only when populations approach their adaptive peaks. This research will address the role of intralocus sexual conflict on the adaptive process by answering these questions: (1) Does sexually antagonistic selection and the resulting sexual conflict influence the adaptive process from the start or does it have more of an influence later when trait values approach their optimum? (2) Does the antagonistic relationship between the sexes change over time allowing for or limiting the evolution of sexual dimorphism? This project integrates the experimental study of evolution with the statistical tools of a large-scale mark-recapture project and next-generation sequencing. Genetic and phenotypic samples are available for nearly every guppy within these experimental populations dating to the start of the experiment. These data provide the opportunity to estimate fitness, mate choice, trait heritability, and the genetic covariance between the sexes. Using this system and these methods, the researchers will answer questions on the genetics of adaptation in a manner not previously possible.