Jennions, Michael - The Australian National University

个人简介

I grew up in South Africa. My MSc was on sperm competition in frogs. One highlight was designing a frog condom (yes, a plastic bag works). I was then lucky to get funding for a PhD in England. I was all set to work on meerkats, but ended up studying sexual selection in a range of animals and plants under the wonderful supervision of Marion Petrie at Oxford. This gave me a wide range of experience, but no technical or taxonomic specialty. In early 1996, Patricia Backwell and I headed off to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. While applying for post-docs I learned the pleasures of sundowners, how to fall off a motorbike, travelled to Barbados and Trinidad, and discovered the virtue of wearing boxers rather than briefs when living in the tropics. In late 1997 my unemployment ended when I received a STRI Fellowship. I continued my tradition of working on new taxa: parental care and mate desertion in cichlids and life history evolution in a live-bearing fish. I arrived in Australia in 2001. Here I have mainly worked on crickets and mosquitofish, and occasionally helped with fieldwork on fiddler crabs in collaboration with Pat Backwell. See also my group web site with info on students and collaborators who do all the real work.

研究领域

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I am a evolutionary biologist with a special interest in behavioural ecology. I mainly work on sexual selection and reproductive decisions (female choice, male-male competition, sperm competition, parental care, life histories etc). I try to test predictions from general theory that can be widely applied across species: Do females prefer symmetrical males? Is the elaboration of sexual signals constrained by predation or by trade-offs with investment in other fitness-enhancing traits? I tend to ask a question and then pick a study animal that can be used to answer it. I have no taxonomic prejudice, but I do think it is important to feel some affinity with your study animal. You have to think it's cool. I am respectful of the incredible expertise many colleagues possess concerning the biology of specific taxa