How heritable is symmetry? (January 2024)
Update, April 2025: this postdoctoral work is now being funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship!
Most animals, including you, are more or less symmetrical on a left-right axis. That symmetry is usually imperfect, to the point that cataloguing our facial symmetry as a proxy for physical attractiveness has become somewhat of a cultural obsession. Hence phrases like “eyebrows are sisters, not twins.”
Social context aside, deviations from symmetry (termed fluctuating asymmetry) are interesting because they tell us that the same conditions have not produced the same outcome:
Asymmetry therefore might tell us about phenotypic robustness, or the degree to which an organism’s development gets thrown off by a perturbation, such as fluctuations in gene expression or environmental conditions.
In my main postdoc project, I’m using the asymmetry of color patterns in cichlid fishes to study how heritable symmetry (and therefore robustness) is. Unlike most kinds of asymmetry, which can be really subtle, color pattern asymmetry can be pretty extreme. That makes it a lot easier for us to track, for example, whether asymmetrical parents have asymmetrical babies.
Earlier updates:
Pivoting to a postdoc (September 2023)
I defended my PhD dissertation in April 2023, and am taking a slow summer to move, reset, and embark on my postdoctoral research. In September 2023 I am joining the Integrative Evolutionary Biology group led by Claudius Kratochwil at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Here I will study the evolution and development of color patterns in fishes, and focus especially on the interplay robustness (the persistence of a phenotype under perturbation) with evolutionary changes. So here’s an important Finnish sentence for you: tämä kala on jotenkin outo!
Lab webpage here.
The evolution of mouthbrooding in fishes (2022)
Right now I’m studying the evolution of mouthbrooding (a kind of parental care where parents incubate offspring in their mouths), and how much feeding phenotypes influence that evolution. I think that mouthbrooding is a beautiful example of an extraordinary behavior (using a mouth as a nursery!) that arises from co-opting existing traits. Specifically, it seems like mouthbrooding is more likely to evolve in species whose feeding adaptations already make them good at mouthbrooding. And the further I dive into the whys and hows, the more I appreciate how much this behavior seems to be the result of the interplay of morphology, behavior, and environment. I have a somewhat out-there idea for why only some fishes in a given environment will evolve mouthbrooding, and it’s what I’m testing now.
More here.
Color analysis software (2021)
I also work a lot on color pattern evolution, and have written a few R packages to make that easier for myself and others. I think that accessible, objective tools for color pattern research are an important part of making sure we’re being careful with the conclusions we draw about how much color matters to other living things. Current projects include:
recolorize, an R package for color segmentation, which integrates with thepavoandpatternizepackages as well as providing a variety of other output formats (vectorized images, individual layers, masks). More here.colordistance, an R package for comparing images by quantitative color similarity:
More here.