Understanding diversity in nature requires not only elucidating the mechanisms that underlie it, but also understanding the fitness consequences of variation. Reptiles and amphibians have unique life histories, but their patterns of aging are under-studied despite the potential to answer unique questions about the evolution of senescence. We take advantage of long-term mark-recapture datasets to untangle the drivers of longevity and rates of aging in these groups.

Our Behavioral Ecophysics lab focuses on the study of organismal mechanisms (e.g., physiology, biomechanics) in light of biotic and abiotic interactions, with the goal of establishing explicit links between physical laws and rules of life, from individual to ecological scales. A central challenge of biological studies is to describe functional links between underlying architecture (e.g., genotype, phenotype) and emergent phenomena (e.g., performance, ecological patterns).