Through combined opportunistic sampling of individuals experiencing naturally occurring stressors and experimental manipulation (e.g., temperature, hormone treatment, pathogen exposure), I work to explain how environmental change manifests as physiological changes at the individual and population levels. To better understand how animals may cope (or fail to cope) with stressors, I use the most appropriate reptile study system to approach each question. For example, I manipulated stress hormone levels via steroid implants in a subset of wild, radio-tracked snakes and assessed movement, behavior, thermoregulation, and venom composition in a first-of-its-kind field study. I have also documented different glucocorticoid-reactivity phenotypes among populations of 2 lizard species experiencing resource restriction and adapting to novel environments. There is much cross-talk among my other areas of research, as disease, invasion into new areas, and changing thermal environments may all interact as stressors.
I plan to expand this area of research to pursue in-depth investigation in stress endocrinology in squamates to understand the role of plasticity and flexibility in coping with stressors and the evolution of this system in different environmental contexts, and the functional consequences of these changes.
I plan to expand this area of research to pursue in-depth investigation in stress endocrinology in squamates to understand the role of plasticity and flexibility in coping with stressors and the evolution of this system in different environmental contexts, and the functional consequences of these changes.