Broadly, I am interested in the evolution of signals in animals using acoustic communication.
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My questions relate to understanding the evolutionary pressures that shape both animal signals and the behaviors associated with generating and processing these signals. Animals are faced with many different kinds of evolutionary pressures as they interact with their environments, and there is still much to understand how these influences interact to shape signals.
TREE FROGS
Here at UTK, I'm studying sexual selection in the context of amphibian acoustic communication systems. Several species of treefrogs are lek-breeders, meaning that males congregate in large groups and call in bouts, attracting females. Females then have to navigate through these large calling bouts to identify and locate a desirable male despite many other males calling. Thus, females are faced with various kinds of noise that obstruct her ability to make decisions. These signals are under the pressure of sexual selection to indicate something about the male's quality.
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Signaling is not always perfectly consistent - individuals are naturally calling repeatedly at different rates, creating a natural level of variation at the individual level. One of my projects focuses on the evolutionary role that this within-individual variation may play in signaling, and determining whether it acts as a trait that carries information, or whether it may also act as a source of noise, obscuring potential information that a female frog may be able to extract from a perfectly consistent call. During the summer of 2024, I focused on scouting for local breeding populations of green tree frogs (Hyla cinerea) around Knoxville, TN, and worked to (1) record calls from males to understand the local population characteristics for use in future playback studies, (2) document through GPS data the recent appearance of these frogs in East Tennessee, and (3) take pictures of the spots on their back to see if it can be used for individual recognition.
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SPRING PEEPERS
In collaboration with Mark Wilber's Lab here at the Agricultural Department at UTK, I worked to understand how the calling behaviors of spring peepers (Pseudacris crucifer) may or may not have been affected by infection of the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (otherwise known as Bd). Bd infection leads to the disease chytridiomycosis, which is responsible for some portion of the global decline of amphibians. I was interested in researching whether this infection would affect their calling behaviors, an energetic cost to frogs. During March and April of 2024, I worked to (1) record calls from a variety of males and (2) swabbed them to understand how infected they were. This research will have important contributions to better understanding how this fungus infection may or may not affect the mating success of these species. This work forms the first chapter of my Ph.D. dissertation, and was officially published in October of 2025 in Ecology and Evolution! You can find this work in my publications page.
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SONGBIRDS
In the Gall lab, we studied how black-capped chickadees and other songbirds communicated in anti-predator contexts, how their communication systems were affected by anthropogenic noise, and the impacts it had on behavioral responses. We investigated two mechanisms that may be responsible for decreased anti-predator responses in anthropogenic noise: (1) masking, in which noise overlaps the stimulus, and (2) distraction, in which noise draws attention away from the sensory domain of interest. Interestingly, our data revealed mixed support for the two hypotheses. The chickadee data suggested they were affected through distraction and nuthatches through masking. The titmice, however, were not affected by the noise playback. This was somewhat surprising given that it is generally thought that most species react to noise in the same way.
As a Neuroscience and Behavior Major, my senior thesis then focused on using auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) to better understand the physiological hearing capabilities of the peripheral auditory systems of these songbirds, and how this might relate to or even explain the behaviors we observed. My data revealed that similar to the behavioral data, nuthatches seemed to be the most impacted by noise as they had the lowest thresholds in quiet, but the highest thresholds in noise. Titmice had intermediate thresholds in quiet, and the lowest thresholds in noise, while chickadees were intermediate in their thresholds in quiet and in noise. We had once again found that species-level differences do exist, and that they impact in the effects of noise on communication and other acoustically-mediated behaviors, such as the detection of predators.
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You can hear about the research that I conducted in this video or this one, taken from my various features as a speaker with both the Golden Gate Bird Alliance and the San Francisco Bay Bird Alliance!