Matt Jenkins
The recipient of the ASN Outstanding Student Poster Award at the ASN’s conference at Asilomar, January 2025, is Matt Jenkins (University of Arizona) for the poster, “Evolution of signaling traits: can developmental environment link competitive ability and plumage traits?” Congratulations!
From Matt Jenkins:
I am a third-year PhD student studying in Renee Duckworth's lab at the University of Arizona. I am broadly interested in the determining factors that drive range boundaries, specifically looking at relating plumage traits in songbirds to competitive ability and how the maternal developmental environment could be influencing this. This was my first time attending ASN and I had a fantastic time! It was great to hear that people are interested in my work as it was the first time I have been able to present data from my PhD at a conference.
Poster Abstract: Key to understanding the function of variation in signaling traits is identifying the mechanisms that integrate them with other traits, such as competitive behavior. Individuals raised in stressful environments often display different behavioral traits compared to individuals in low stress environments, and if signaling traits are also influenced by the developmental environment it might lead to integration of ornamentation and behavior. Such integration could set the stage for evolution of ornaments that signal competitive behavior or could instead provide information about both male quality and resource holding potential. To test these alternatives, we use a long-term data set from western bluebirds (Sialia mexicana), a species in which there is a well characterized stress-induced maternal effect on offspring aggression. In contrast to expectations that more aggressive birds would have larger patches, we found that birds with smaller breast patch size were more aggressive. Previous work on western bluebirds has shown that maternal effects leading to early developmental stress can lead to higher rates of aggression in offspring, so these findings could indicate that there is a maternally induced tradeoff between breast patch size and aggression. Thus, our results have important implications for how signals of dominance might originate and emphasize the importance of taking into account developmental environment to understand the function of signaling traits.
