Events Detail

Speaker:
Gisela Kopp, University of Konstanz

This event is part of an event series „Departamental Seminars“.

Gisela Kopp is a Research Fellow at Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz. Her main interest is evolutionary biology, especially the interaction of behavior and genetics and its effects on species formation processes: Why and how closely related species develop different behavior patterns and how can these behaviors in turn influence the evolution of these populations?

Building an integrative framework of behavioural variation in a macroevolutionary context

Tremendous efforts have been made to describe the Earth’s biodiversity and identify the processes that shape it. Evolutionary biology, and in particular speciation research, is at the very center of this endeavour as it disentangles why and how taxa diversify. Despite the growing body of evidence on the complex interplay between behaviour, genomes, and genetic diversity, this topic has barely received any attention in species other than humans. We are lacking an overarching framework that explicitly integrates behavioural ecology with macroevolution to identify the factors and processes that link behavioural traits with genomic evolution and diversification processes. In this talk I will provide an overview about my research that aims to fill this gap by building the links in the explanatory chain that connect behavioural traits to diversification. The key questions  are: (i) Which data and analyses are needed to efficiently describe diverse social systems across taxa in a quantitative way? (ii) Do these descriptors consistently correlate with measures of genetic structure and diversity across taxa? (iii) Is genetic structure and diversity a predictor of diversification and species richness? (iv) Do certain behavioural traits, through their effects on diversity and differentiation, impact diversification patterns on a macroevolutionary scale? To achieve this, my research group at the University of Konstanz will combine tools from the rapidly advancing fields of animal behaviour, population genomics, and macroevolution and use different approaches from case studies in wild animal populations to theoretical modelling and broad-scale meta-analyses across a diverse set of animals.