Anne Dalziel

An animal's capacity for locomotion can influence its ability to successfully perform a variety of ecologically important tasks (e.g. escaping from predators, attracting mates, reproducing), but we know very little about the mechanisms by which activity capacity evolves. For my PhD dissertation, I am studying the physiological and metabolic traits that are associated with differences in swimming capacity between non-migratory and migratory marine populations of the threespine stickleback. I am also testing to see if these traits have evolved in parallel in a number of independent stream-resident populations, which is suggestive of natural selection.