| Awards and Outreach | -> | ABS Keynote/Fellow Lecutres 2000 |
One of two Fellow's Lectures at the 37th annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society (sponsored jointly by Morehouse College and Zoo Atlanta) will be presented by Dr. Christine Boake, from the University of Tennessee. Dr. Boake studies the role that mating behavior plays in the process of species formation, and she will present a talk entitled New Promises for Behavior Genetics for a New Decade.
Dr. Boake received her bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin, and her PhD from Cornell. After a postdoctoral position at the University of Chicago, she held a faculty research position at the University of Hawaii. She has been at the University of Tennessee since 1988. Dr. Boake has published nearly 40 professional papers, and she has edited a book on behavior genetics.
Dr. Boake's research focuses on the process of sexual communication and its consequences. One of the most intriguing consequences is that sexual signals may drive speciation. For about a decade she has been studying Hawaiian fruit flies (Drosophila species) because they are a group where mating behavior may be closely associated with speciation. Dr. Boake's research consists primarily of laboratory experimentation, but she and her students also makes field trips to the cloud forests where the species live.
Species are identified by their failure to produce hybrids. One of the reasons for this failure can be in the inability of animals of different species to recognize each other as potential mates. The two species that Dr. Boake studies live in the same forests, and they are separated only by their mating behavior; hybrids that are produced in the laboratory are fully viable and fertile. She has found that the failure to hybridize is attributable to a failure of recognition during the approach that should precede courtship. Her lab has been systematically evaluating possible signals that are available during approach, to determine which ones are involved in recognition. They have found that a substrate vibration produced by males may be critical to the process of species recognition. They are also studying whether the signals that permit species recognition are also involved in mating behavior within each species.
A central part of any research on speciation is to study the genetic control of differences between species. In the past decade, major debate has surrounded this topic. As a result of the Human Genome Project, exciting new genetic techniques are available to be applied to questions in basic biology, as well as to medical problems. In her lecture Dr. Boake will discuss ways that the study of animal behavior can be integrated with molecular genetics.
When not climbing through Hawaiin rainforests and watching mating Drosophila, Dr. Christine Boake is an avid gardener and a gourmet cook. Although she finds herself with too little free time, she still tries to find time to bake bread and nurture her flowers.