in
Action
So if you have some wildlife in the wings waiting their turn, have it set up so if need be, you can get a reasonable shot of them. You never know.
Details: One of the few (or maybe only), picture of a Jefferson morph eating another larval. In the rest of the picture you can see that there were larval of all different sizes. So there was not one egg laying event or the eggs were hatching at different times, for some reason.
Date:
From Dr. Howard Whiteman, Assistant
Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, Murray State University,
Murray, KY 42071
web-site; http://campus.murraystate.edu/academic/faculty/Howard.Whiteman/research.html
Email: howard.whiteman@murraystate.edu
Evolutionary Ecology of Cannibalistic Polyphenism
I have also expanded my interest in environmentally induced polymorphisms by working on cannibalistic larval morphs in tiger salamanders. In some populations, two larval morphologies are present: a "typical" morph and a "cannibal" morph. Cannibal morphs differ from typical morphs in that they have an enlarged head and vomerine ridge ("teeth") which assist them when feeding on conspecifics. This bizarre morphology is environmentally induced, with a higher frequency of cannibals produced at higher larval densities under laboratory conditions. However, little is known about the environmental factors influencing the production of cannibal morphs in the field and the fitness consequences of becoming cannibalistic.
Much of my cannibalism work has been performed in collaboration
with a number of NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) students
at the RMBL. Together, we have found evidence for geographic variation
in the mechanisms that produce cannibals (Sheen and Whiteman
1998) and discovered that large invertebrate prey indirectly affect
the production of cannibals, by increasing the body size variation within
both natural and laboratory populations (Whiteman et al. in review).
The latter study also suggests that the geographic variation found in Sheen
and Whiteman
(1998) may be a result of regional differences in large prey types.
Future research is aimed at exploring the sex-specific payoffs of cannibalistic
morphs in this species.
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