EEB Thursday Seminar Series - Color, Cold, and Cassidines: Integrative approaches to studying adaptive evolution in tortoise beetles

Seminar Summary - Understanding how ecological pressures shape and maintain phenotypic diversity remains a central challenge in evolutionary biology. My research uses tortoise beetles as a model system to explore the interplay between ecology, behavior, and genomics in the evolution of adaptive traits. I will present work from a long-term study of a color polymorphic beetle, where mate choice experiments, predator bioassays, and genomic analyses together reveal how ecological interactions shape and maintain color variation. I will also share new directions from my lab, including ongoing work on thermal tolerance using chill coma recovery across species and geographic gradients, paired with transcriptomic approaches.