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Welcome to the Anholt lab Web site. We study experimental ecology at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, BC, Canada . |
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Our lab is focused on the study of interactions between organisms. Our approach is to combine an understanding of organism traits with manipulative experiments to test for the consequences of the traits. Although the taxa we study are diverse, several themes connect the projects. Brad Anholt began investigating inducible defenses in tadpoles but has since concluded that population dynamics of protozoans are much more tractable. With the help of Krzysztof Wiackowski (Jagiellonien University, Krakow, Poland) and Jürgen Kusch (Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany) we have been working on the dynamic consequences of inducible defenses using the ciliated protozoan Euplotes. We have been able to establish that there is variation among clones for the speed and level of inducibility. We are currently running experiments to see if we can cause the evolution of this trait. In some clones, but not all, there is reduced foraging efficiency in induced clones. The next step is to measure population dynamics amd food web effects. The UVic campus is a five-minute walk from the beach. It didn't take long to discover the copepod Tigriopus californicus, which shares splash-pools above the tide line with the introduced mosquito Aedes togoi. Arianne Albert (now at UBC) began our work on the interactions between these two species, which can be both competitive and predatory. Good natural history observations by Chris Borkent (now at Berkeley) alerted us to wild fluctuations in sex ratio. Maarten Voordouw, who just defended his PhD has been able to show that sex ratio is heritable, primarily through the paternal line, and that there is an environmental component. We get more males at higher temperatures. Right now we are trying to get at the mechanism of inheritance. The food-web manipulations we do with Euplotes are parallel to work we have completed on invasive species, which are food-web perturbations on a grand scale. John Volpe (now Assistant Professor in Environmental Studies, UVic) has been looking at interactions between native steelhead and feral-spawned Atlantic salmon. Purnima Govindarajulu did similar work with native amphibians and invading bullfrogs. Both of these projects involved extensive field-work to document the extent of the invasion and manipulative lab or mesocosm work to get reliable estimates of the effect of one species on another. These studies have been funded through the BC Habitat Conservation Trust Fund. For more information click on the buttons at the upper left of this page or contact us at: Brad Anholt, Biology |
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Last modified 5.July.2005. |
