Animal visual capabilities differ significantly from our own, so in studies of visual signals and visually guided behaviors, we must account for the appropriate receiver’s visual capabilities. Much of my research applies measures of receiver visual capabilities to studies of signaling. This allows me to ask questions such as: How do partners in interspecies interactions perceive and recognize one another? How do sensory capabilities and signals co-evolve? How do interspecific signaling interactions arise and remain stable?
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Much of my research in this area focuses on cleaner shrimp and their client fish. Cleaner shrimp and their client fish are one of the most colorful and charismatic mutualisms described so far between predators and potential prey. Cleaner shrimp live at “cleaning stations” on coral reefs; reef fish “clients” visit these stations and assume a prone pose, allowing cleaners to remove and eat parasites and dead skin from their scales, gill slits, and mouths. Clients benefit from parasite removal, and cleaners receive a meal. Cleaners and clients are puzzling, however, because many client fish can and regularly do eat small crustaceans, though they very rarely eat cleaner shrimp. Why doesn’t the client eat the cleaner, and how, evolutionarily, do opponents come to cooperate? One hypothesis is that cleaners have evolved visual signals that identify them as beneficial partners, rather than food. Many mutualisms are mediated by signals—any act or structure that elicits a specific response in an intended receiver—and displaying the appropriate signals can literally be a matter of life and death for a cleaner shrimp. Thus, clients can potentially exert strong selection pressure on cleaner signals, especially those that identify an individual as a mutualistic partner, rather than food. |
Various ongoing projects seek to:
(1) Quantify the visual physiology and behavior of both cleaners and clients, to understand how visual signals mediate cleaner-client relationships
(2) Describe signaling behavior and signal form across cleaner shrimp species, and incorporate phylogenetics to understand how visual signaling relates to the evolutionary transition from predator/prey to mutualist
(3) Use cleaners and clients as a model to examine the dynamics and reliability of interspecific signaling, which have received far less attention than intraspecific signals
(4) Incorporate both field and lab experiments to investigate how individual cleaners and clients learn mutualistic behaviors, for example by social transmission
(1) Quantify the visual physiology and behavior of both cleaners and clients, to understand how visual signals mediate cleaner-client relationships
(2) Describe signaling behavior and signal form across cleaner shrimp species, and incorporate phylogenetics to understand how visual signaling relates to the evolutionary transition from predator/prey to mutualist
(3) Use cleaners and clients as a model to examine the dynamics and reliability of interspecific signaling, which have received far less attention than intraspecific signals
(4) Incorporate both field and lab experiments to investigate how individual cleaners and clients learn mutualistic behaviors, for example by social transmission