Located at the Entomology & Nematology Department, University of Florida
Recent news from our laboratory:
June 2022: Congratulations to James Boothroyd, Kaili Sherman, Merrick Graham, Claire Parker, Gayatri Raina, and Yichen Li for their outstanding poster presentations at the Florida Entomological Society conference.
May 2022: Gayatri Raina and Yichen Li join us to work on competitive injuries in leaf-footed bugs. Welcome!
April 2022: Benjamin Jarrett, Human Frontiers Fellow, arrives for three months of experimentation with leaf-footed bugs.
April 2022: Dr. Miller travelled virtually to the University of Georgia to deliver a seminar on the evolution of insect weaponry
March 2022: Congratulations to Zachary Emberts, former Ph.D. student in the lab, who has accepted a faculty position..
February 2022: Congratulations to Ummat Somjee, former M.S. and Ph.D. student in the lab, for receiving the Stengl-Wyer Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin.
February 2022: Be sure to catch Ginny Greenway's presentations at SICB+ online conference!
January 2022: Ph.D. student James Boothroyd delivered his first conference talk (in-person!) at the SICB Annual Meeting 2022 in Phoenix, AZ.
January 2022: We received the cover of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology with this paper on across-species mating dynamics.
December 2021: Congratulations to Ginny Greenway, former postdoctoral associate in the lab, for receiving an ECR fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. Ginny will be conducting research at the University of East Anglia starting in 2022.
November 2021: Hooded Crow Pictures from the UK is visiting. Narnia femorata, our primary study species, is going to be featured in a three-part documentary on insects, similar to the Life in the Undergrowth series!
October 2021: Dr. Christine W. Miller directed a panel presentation titled, "Successful Implementation of a Campus Wide CURE Initiative" at the Florida Statewide Symposium on Best Practices in Undergraduate Research.
September 2021: Dr. Miller travelled virtually to the University of Texas-Austin to deliver a seminar for the integrative biology group.
August 2021: Current lab members, Sam Zlotnik, Steven Smit, James Boothroyd, and Ginny Greenway are presenting at the ABS virtual conference! Also check out the presentations from former lab members, including Lauren Cirino and Ummat Somjee.
August 2021: Females in many species mate with multiple males, a phenomenon called polyandry. In this new paper, we used semi-natural enclosures to track mating behaviors and resulting offspring production. We found that the most promiscuous males mated with the least polyandrous females and therefore experienced less sperm competition. Also, the most polyandrous females also produced more offspring, suggesting that they benefit from mating with more males.
July 2021: Seasonal changes in nutrition can profoundly affect the robustness of a sexually selected weapon. Check out our study, and if you do not have access to the journal's formatted version, the preprint is available here.
June 2021: We previous found that males that autotomized (dropped) a hind limb weapon during development have enhanced fertilization success. What, you ask, is the mechanism for the boost in fertility? We partnered with the laboratory of Trish Moore at UGA and discovered that males with autotomy have greater spermatogenesis -- they make more sperm.
April 2021: Males invest in their testes and weapons, and these traits can trade off. In this new paper we discovered that the social context matters. Males grow large testes when they are raised in large groups, and the trade-off with weapons becomes invisible.