Environmental Futures Seminar - Professor Sigal Balshine

Many species exhibit discrete variation in mating behaviours. But why hasn't evolution favour one “best” way to reproduce? How and why does such within sex variation evolve? In this talk I will describe our interdisciplinary research on a singing toadfish, the plainfin midshipman, a deep sea species with two distinct alternative male types. Large guarder males aggressively compete for and defend nest sites using acoustic signals to court females. In contrast, sneaker males do not guard nests or court females, but instead, steal fertilizations from the guarder males by either sneaking into the nest when a female is present, or by fanning sperm into the nest from the periphery. The enormous costs of paternal care combined with the costs of breeding in the challenging intertidal zone have selected for intense episodes of both pre and post mating competition. In my talk, I will describe how my students and I have used genetic, ecological, and behavioural tools to examine the evolution of these male alternative reproductive tactics. I will end the seminar by describing some of our more recent studies that quantify the impacts of ocean noise pollution on these strange soniferous fish.

About the speaker

Sigal is a Professor at McMaster University, Canada. Her research interests are centred on evolutionary behavioural ecology with a special focus on sociality, breeding system evolution, impacts of contaminants on behaviour and invasive species. She mostly uses fish as model systems but has also published research on human and birds.