Date/Time
Date(s) - Thu 22 October
12:00 - 13:00
ERI Seminar.
Speaker: Sarah Flanagan (University of Canterbury)
Abstract:
Many animals bear sexually dimorphic ornaments or armaments, but many also do not — the evolutionary mechanisms favouring dimorphism in one species but not another are not entirely clear. In her talk, Dr Sarah Flanagan will share some of the research her group has been doing to understand how and why sexual dimorphism appears in some species, but not others, with a focus on species in the fish family Syngnathidae (pipefishes, seahorses, and seadragons). They approach these questions at various levels of biological organisation, from genetic variation and transcriptional dimorphism through to behavioural ecology.
Biography:
Sarah Flanagan received a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Biology from Colby College (Maine, USA) in 2011, where she gained an appreciation for behavioural ecology. She then earned a PhD in Biology at Texas A&M University (USA) in 2016, doing research on population genetics and evolution of pipefishes. She had a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (Tennessee, USA) and began her career at the University of Canterbury in 2018, where she led a research group that uses evolutionary and genetic insights to learn about conservation concerns and evolutionary patterns in (mostly marine) organisms.