Laboratory of Ecological and Evolutionary Dynamics
Prof. Hanna Kokko
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I hold a professorship in animal ecology at Helsinki University, as well as an Adjunct Professor status at the Australian National University.
My interests are diverse, ranging from sexual selection to the
theory of sustainable exploitation of natural resources. For more details, you can
have a look at my personal web page here.
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Dr. Katja Heubel
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My research interests lie within the field of sexual selection. This embraces behaviour, evolution and population biology. Questions I am interested in are:
How do mate choice and interactions among individuals depend on conditions such as the social and environmental context? And how may this affect populations?
How can we explain maintenance of evolutionary coexistence of sexual and asexual females in the mating complex of the gynogenetic Amazon molly Poecilia formosa?
What role play individual behaviour, social interactions and the environmental context in such a mating complex?
Furthermore, I am interested in studying the role of female-female interactions in sexual selection and its plasticity depending on condition, and social and environmental context.
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Dr. Wouter Vahl
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I am a postdoctoral researcher at the
Laboratory of Ecological and Evolutionary Dynamics. I have
broad interests in evolutionary ecology. In my Ph.D. thesis, titled
'Interference competition among foraging waders'
, I addressed the questions
why (evolutionary) and how (mechanistically) foraging animals spent time
and energy interacting with each other. Insights from my Ph.D. research
have given me an interest in the consequences of social behaviour on
processes operating at the level of the population.
My research involves a combination of various approaches, including
observational work, literature studies, lab and field experiments and
the development of new theory. My main expertise now is the statistical
design and analysis, and the conductance of, controlled experiments,
and the theoretical study of social behaviour. In the LEED /
Kokkonuts group, I invoke these skills to
study animal dispersal behaviour. I am doing theoretical work on the
tension between individual- and population level consequences of dispersal
in combination with experimental work on the dispersal behaviour of
Colorado Potato Beetles.
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Dr. Hope Klug
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My research focuses on questions in behavioral and evolutionary ecology.
I am interested in the evolution of parental care and mating systems, and
the effects of both sexual and natural selection acting on life history
traits. During my dissertation research, I explored the evolutionary
significance of filial cannibalism, which commonly co-occurs with parental
care in a range of animals. More recently, I have begun to focus on the
importance of population-level processes in sexual selection theory.
My research necessitates an integrative approach, and thus,
I use a combination of field observations, laboratory experiments,
and mathematical modeling. You can read more about my work
here. |
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Dr. Maria del Mar Delgado
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My research focuses on animal dispersal and the different behavioural
strategies used during this process. I have broad interest in how floater dynamics
and behavioural decisions during dispersal affect population dynamics
and structure. This embraces behaviour, ecology and population biology.
During my PhD thesis, titled "Exploring Natal Dispersal under the
Perspective of Animal Movement Analysis. A Behavioural Study on the
Dispersal of a Long-lived Species", I investigated the effects of
landscape characteristics, individual fitness and the organism's
cognitive and learning abilities on dispersal movement behaviours of a
long-lived species, the eagle owl (Bubo bubo). Furthermore, I am
interested in studying the evolution of signals in animal communication,
especially in nocturnal species. |
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Jostein Starrfelt
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My research interests lie deep in the theoretical realms of ecology and evolution.
The overarching theme of my intellectual poke into biology is on the relation between
patterns and processes; how to interpret patterns on different scales, identifying
the potential (or obviously wrong) mechanisms that might create them, and on
stressing that the leap from finding a potential mechanism to invoking its action
and presence is often made far to quickly. Particularly, this involves the use of
null-models and developing null-expectations for ecological and evolutionary scenarios.
Currently my specific projects are on the spatial spread of invasive species and on the
relation between reproductive effort and population regulation structure. (I am also called
the Logic Police of the group.)
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Christoph Meier
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I will provide the text for this space
as soon as I get out of here.
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Jussi Lehtonen
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I have a broad interest in the natural sciences, and with my recently
started PhD in the Laboratory of Ecological and Evolutionary Dynamics I
hope to combine my mathematical interests with biological research. Some
of the themes that my work will touch upon are the evolution of separate
sexes (i.e. the evolution of anisogamy), the evolution of male and female
roles in reproduction and parental care, and the sexual conflict that this
can lead to.
Although my PhD will mainly consist of theoretical work, my previous
experience in biology has for a large part been field work, such as my
master's thesis on the Seychelles magpie robin (also in LEED).
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Barbara Fischer
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I am a PhD student at the University of Bern in Switzerland and at the
Evolution and Ecology Program of IIASA in Austria, now visiting LEED
for several months. I got fascinated by the enormous variety of
reproductive strategies existing in nature. Hence my research so far
concentrated on questions in life-history evolution, specifically in
environments that are not constant but changing over time. During my
time at LEED I'm planning to work on some aspects in the evolution of
maternal effects, that is how mothers might influence the offspring's
phenotype by other mechanisms but genetic inheritance. I want to
investigate how properties of the environment could influence the
evolution of such patterns.
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Dr. Debora Arlt
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My research interests are in behavioural and evolutionary ecology.
I study habitat selection behaviour and dispersal, and I am interested
in the causes of individual variation and its consequences for population
dynamics. I am a postdoc based at the
Centre of Agri-Environmental Research at the University of Reading, but parts of my research are
done here in Helsinki in collaboration with members of the LEED.
I am using a population of the Mauritius kestrel as a model system
that provides a complete pedigree and detailed data on habitat
selection. I use quantitative genetic analyses to quantify the
causes of individual variation in habitat selection, and develop
individual-based models to predict population responses to future
changes in the environment. I also continue using the
northern wheatear to study related questions.
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