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 Genevieve
Kozak
Advisor: Jenny Boughman
Contact Information:
426 Birge Hall
430 Lincoln Dr
University of Wisconsin
Madison, WI 53706
phone: 608/262-4437
email: kozak@wisc.edu
Research Interests: Social Behavior and Speciation
How do social behavior and learning contribute to the formation of new species? Social interactions are important for coordination and cooperation among individuals, but they also may be sources of information. Individuals may learn to recognize mates through social interactions and this can have important consequences for reproductive isolation. Females often prefer mates that are similar to their parents. If individuals learn to recognize mates from parents or kin, they will tend to mate with others similar to themselves. Preferences for similar individuals could lead to assortative mating and isolation between incipient species, if these species come into contact. My dissertation work seeks to determine how social behavior and learning influence reproductive isolation in recently diverged pairs of threespine stickleback species. I wish to relate changes in mate recognition directly to social behavior by investigating how different types of experience (within groups and with parents) alter group member recognition and mate recognition. I am also interested in how the environment affects the expression of recognition and am investigating how discrimination changes with exposure to predators. I hope to be able to compare how experience within a group, with parents, and with predators affects the likelihood of mating with heterospecifics and reproductive isolation in these species pairs.
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