Marlene Zuk

Our lab focuses on emerging questions in behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology.  We use invertebrate systems to study the evolution of mating behavior and secondary sexual characters in natural populations.  I and others in my lab seek to understand how natural and sexual selection pressures shape the behavior, life history, and morphology of animals.  Currently, we are studying the conflict between sexual and natural selection in Pacific field crickets, Teleogryllus oceanicus, which are subject to an acoustically-orienting parasitic fly.  The fly uses the male cricket’s calling song to find a host, which means that natural selection favors reducing the same signal that sexual selection is expected to enhance.  What can a cricket do?  In some of the populations of the crickets, 50-90% of the males now exhibit a wing mutation that renders them silent, protecting them from the fly but posing a problem in mate attraction.  The mutation spread in fewer than twenty generations, remarkably rapid evolution.  How do the crickets deal with the loss of their sexual signal, and how was the trait able to spread so quickly?  This work has also led to a more general interest in rates of evolution and the role of behavior in the establishment of novel traits.

In addition, like others who study sexual behavior in animals, I have noticed that people like to apply what we learn to their own behavior.  I often am contacted by journalists and other people asking questions like, "Is monogamy natural?" or "Does homosexuality exist in non-humans?"  I enjoy interacting with other scientists as well as the public in discussions of these and related issues, and have written several books for a general audience about animal behavior and evolution.