This event has been cancelled; we are working on rebooking for a new date in Fall 2026. 

From Birth to Death: The Evolution of Life Histories in Guppies (Poecilia reticulata)

Most think of evolution as being too slow to be observable in real time.  My career goal was to challenge this presumption and to perform experiments that test aspects of the theory of evolution in natural populations.  Nature has created a template for doing so in the form of natural variation among populations of guppies in the predators they co-occur with and providing a setting in which risks of predation can be manipulated and the rate of evolution can be quantified.  This setting enabled me and my colleagues to  describe how, why and how fast evolution happens.  We discovered that ecology and evolution are interacting processes that can reciprocally shape one another.  Predators don’t directly cause guppy evolution by increasing their risk of mortality. They instead act indirectly by lowering their population density, which in turn reduces their impact on their ecosystem and increases per capita resource availability.

David Reznick, Ph.D. studies the process of evolution by natural selection from an experimental perspective and test evolutionary theory in natural populations.

Listen to Dr. Reznick's interview with the Big Biology podcast: Evolution at the speed of life (Ep 145)

11:50 am- Snacks & Socializing
noon- Talk Begins