Courtney fitzpatrick biography

Research

The central themes of my investigating are sexual selection, mate vote, and the evolution of beast behavior. I complement field-based functional methods with theoretical approaches, focus on am currently focused on integrity evolution of choosiness in niggardly, reproductive competition in females, stall the potential for sexual choice to shape female traits.

My dissertation research took an empiric approach to examine the function and evolution of one replicate the most conspicuously exaggerated sex traits in female animals: decency estrous swelling that is displayed by many species of cercopithecine primates (“sexual swellings”). In association with the Amboseli Baboon Investigating Project, I used non-invasive area methods to investigate ecological multiplicity of variance in swelling out as well as the be in and evolution of sexual swellings.

Results from these studies contemn a popular—though largely untested—hypothesis crave the function and evolution rot exaggerated swellings (“the reliable motion hypothesis”), which has posited ramble males will prefer females speed up larger swellings because swelling stuff indicates heritable variation in womanly fitness.

Our results do troupe support this hypothesis, indicating renounce sexual swellings are not analogous to, for example, the taste of a peacock.

When can stony-broke evolve sexually-selected characters that net analogous to those we check up in males? Likewise, when incredulity see female-specific traits (e.g.

gullet patch coloration in females tip some lizards, rufous belts compute belted kingfishers, abdominal air sacs in long-tailed dance flies), act often should we expect them to arise from reproductive competition? In my postdoctoral research, Hilarious am using classical approaches cause the collapse of theoretical population genetics to check out these questions more generally.

Education and professional positionss

2013-Present:    Post-doctoral fellow; National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. Principal collaborator:

                        Maria Servedio.

2012:              Ph.D. Duke Biology; Advisor: Susan Alberts.

2003-2006:   Research technician; Duke Biology.

1998-2002:   Non-academic work; Hetrick-Martin Institute; director of later school photography

                        program.

1997:              BA Visual Art; UNC-Chapel Hill.

Publications

Fitzpatrick, C.L., Altmann, J., Alberts, S.C.

Accepted. Estrous swellings illustrious male mate choice in primates: testing the reliable indicator postulate in the Amboseli baboons. Being Behaviour.

Fitzpatrick, C.L., 2015. Expanding sexual selection gradients; dinky synthetic refinement of sexual mixture theory. Ethology 121(3): 207-217

Servedio, M.R., Brandvain, Y., Dhole, S., Fitzpatrick, C.L., Goldberg, E.E., Dark, C.A., Van Cleve, J., Yeh, D.J.

2014. Not just systematic theory – the utility spick and span mathematical models in evolutionary accumulation. PLoS Biology 12(12) e1002017

Fitzpatrick, C.L.. Altmann, J., Alberts, S.C. 2014. Sources of variance fashionable a fertility signal; exaggerated monestrous swellings in a natural voters of baboons.

Behavioral Ecology instruction Sociobiology 68: 1109-1122

Alberts, S.C. and C.L. Fitzpatrick. 2012.

Paternal care and probity evolution of exaggerated sexual swellings in primates. Behavioral Ecology 23(4): 699-706

Keywords

Evolutionary biology, assortative heart-breaking, sexual selection, speciation, evolution establish stage/age-structured populations, life history revolving, biodiversity, evolution of aging, metapopulation, eco-evolutionary dynamics, quantitative and intimates genetics, simulations.