The last century has experienced a marked increase in emerging infectious disease (EID, hereafter) – jeopardizing human, domestic animal, and wildlife health. EIDs are commonly associated with spillover from one host species into a novel host species, with many destructive diseases, for both livestock and wildlife, emerging at the wildlife-livestock...
The intricate relationship between wildlife health and the quality of their environment is well established, with technological advances increasing our understanding and aiding the unraveling of underlying mechanisms. Large herbivores require forage of sufficient quality to maintain their condition to reproduce and survive, all while warding off parasites and predators...
Direct anthropogenic stressors have caused drastic declines in wildlife populations over the past two centuries. In the face of these threats, spillover of infectious disease from domestic animals and livestock into wildlife, and novel interactions between parasites and pathogens within wildlife communities, have further suppressed already vulnerable populations. As management...
All mammals host communities of commensal microbes in and on their bodies. Recent technological advances, combined with experimental studies in laboratory animals, are beginning to reveal the ubiquitous links between the gut microbiome and host disease, metabolism, immunity, and numerous other host functions. A new challenge of microbiome research is...
Biologists have long been fascinated with reproductive traits, in part because they are frequently exaggerated or showy, and they commonly vary among closely related species. Exaggerated sexual traits, in particular, have been the focus of intense empirical and theoretical research, but most of this work has focused on traits involved...
Disease acts as a powerful selective force in natural systems, driving the rapid evolution of resistance in the host. In the face of a myriad of pathogenic challenges in natural systems, hosts must balance the energetic needs of maintenance and reproduction with costly resistance mechanisms. In this dissertation I will...
Earth is experiencing unprecedented biodiversity loss. Amphibians are at the forefront of this biodiversity loss, with species declines estimated to be more severe than those of birds and mammals. Amphibian population declines and extinctions are driven by a number of factors including climate change, habitat destruction, contaminants and disease but...
Animals aggregate and interact in nonuniform and nonrandom patterns, which lead to group level characteristics that have important evolutionary and ecological consequences. Network analysis provides a useful conceptual framework for linking animal interactions at all scales from dyads to communities, to populations and ecosystems. Despite exciting theoretical and applied advances...
Myxozoans are microscopic parasites, related to corals and jellyfish. Most Myxozoa probably have two-host lifecycles that require a vertebrate (typically fish) and invertebrate (annelid or bryozoan). However no life cycle is known from the Sphaerospora lineage.
I hypothesized that the life cycle of Sphaerospora elegans, a myxozoan parasite of three-spined...
The Northern Rubber Boa (Charina bottae) is a small, secretive boa native to the Pacific Northwest. Despite this being possibly the highest latitude boas and one of only two boas native to the continental U.S., it has received surprisingly little attention. Most of the research on the natural history of...