Francis Ecology Lab

Ecological and Evolutionary Responses to Sensory Stimuli

 

Differences in the complexity and timing of activities such as bird song and reproduction evolved in conjunction with organisms’ ability to perceive reliable environmental cues. The natural world is full of these cues and global changes in sensory stimuli that accompany human activities, such as anthropogenic light and noise, can mimic, mask or otherwise change organisms' relationships with formally reliable information.

 

In our lab we seek to understand how animals interact with one another and their environment in the context of their sensory environment and sensory abilities. We ask questions about how the acoustic environment has shaped species traits, how the natural and anthropogenic environmental features drive species distributions, shape communities and mediate interactions & even how sounds mediate human experiences in nature.

 

To date, most of our work has focused on how sensory environments influence organisms, whether it be the effects of noise on animal distributions and interactions, their glucocorticoids and reproductive success, how natural and anthropogenic sounds influence behaviors and can cascade through ecological webs or how light pollution can disrupt obligate mutualisms or change spillover risk of zoonotic diseases. 

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We also ask why organisms respond as they do to variation in sensory environments through comparative work with key insights on sensitivities driven by sensory or ecological traits. Acoustic traits drive changes in community structure of bat and bird communities with changes in natural acoustic conditions and both visual and acoustic traits explain variation in phenology and measures of reproductive success in birds coping with noise and light pollution.

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We are increasingly interested in how sensory environments have shaped sensory function within and across species.

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