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Coastal plain swamp sparrow
(2005)
White-throated sparrow chicks, day 6 (2006) |
About I am a second-year graduate student in
Steve Nowicki's
lab with interests in animal communication and behavior. Currently I am
planning to study the role of mating signals in sexual selection, under the
broader contexts of communication systems, signal perception and population
dynamics.* My senior thesis at the University of
Maryland focused on geographic vocal variation in two subspecies of swamp
sparrow. I found that songs of inland (Melospiza georgiana georgiana)
and coastal plain (M. g. nigrescens) swamp sparrows differ along several
acoustic parameters and that males respond more strongly to songs of their
own subspecies than to songs of the other subspecies. The extent of song
variation and discrimination suggests continued divergence, possibly as a
consequence of morphological differences arising from adaptations to their
respective habitats. [PDF: Liu,
I.A., B. Lohr, B. Olsen, and R. Greenberg. 2008. Macrogeographic vocal variation in subspecies of swamp
sparrow. Condor 110:102-109.] After graduating, I assisted in
fieldwork for a doctoral project investigating the effects of hormones on
parenting behavior in white-throated sparrows. Finally, I spent most of 2007
monitoring the population demographics of Florida scrub-jays at Archbold
Biological Station, a great place to hold a research internship before
beginning grad school. I worked again with swamp sparrows in
summer 2008 to examine how audience effects (changes in signaling behavior
due to the presence of multiple receivers) guide male vocal responses in
territorial interactions. You can see field pictures, as well as photos from
previous seasons, on my thoroughly unprofessional blog
here. *This sentence will probably be edited a million times before I
settle on an actual research topic. Stay tuned. |
Florida scrub-jays being chilly (2007) |
