Recent Courses

EE BIOL 194B - Research Group or Internship Seminars: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
EE BIOL 200C - Animal Behavior
EE BIOL M286 | STATS M286 - Seminar: Statistical Problem Solving for Population Biology

Research Areas

Behavior, Conservation Biology, Evolutionary Biology

Research Interests

I have many research interests and this is reflected by the diverse projects in my lab. Our focus is at the level of phenotypes, but we make good use of molecular tools too. We tend to study animals that can be easily observed and manipulated in the field, but no taxa, habitats, or regions are considered out of bounds.
Few would deny that the behavior of animals is an integral part of their ecology and evolution, but biologists often make unwarranted assumptions about behavior. Taking behavior into account can completely change the expected dynamics of a system.
Aggression between species is very common and often just as intense as aggression within species. Evolutionary responses to interspecific aggression must therefore be a major determinant of how species diversify. Yet aggression is understudied compared to other types of interactions, such as predation, hybridization, and exploitative competition. We are helping to fill this void with theoretical and empirical research.

Selected Publications

Grether G.F., Peiman K.S., Tobias J.A., Robinson B.W., "Causes and consequences of behavioral interference between species", Trends Ecol. Evol, - (2017) [link].

Losin, N., Drury, J.P., Peiman, K.S., Storch, C.
Grether, G.F., "The ecological and evolutionary stability of interspecific
territoriality", Ecology Letters, 19 : 260-267 (2016) [link].

Drury, J.P., Okamoto, K.W., Anderson, C.N., and Grether, G.F., "Reproductive interference explains persistence of aggression between species", Proc. Roy. Soc. B, 282 : 20142256- (2015) [link].

Drury, J.P. & Grether, G.F., "Interspecific aggression, not interspecific mating, drives character displacement in the wing coloration of male rubyspot damselflies (Hetaerina)", Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 281 : - (2014) [link].

Grether, G.F., Levi, A., Antaky, C. and Shier, D.M., "Communal roosting sites are potential ecological traps: experimental evidence in a Neotropical harvestman", Behavioral Ecology & Sociobiology, 68 : 1629-1638 (2014) [link].

Okamoto, K.W. and Grether, G.F., "The evolution of species recognition in competitive and mating contexts: the relative efficacy of alternative mechanisms of character displacement", Ecology Letters, 16 : 670-678 (2013) [link].

Grether, G.F., "Redesigning the genetic architecture of phenotypically plastic traits in a changing environment", Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 16 : - (2013) [link].

Grether, G.F., Anderson, C.N., Drury, J.P., Kirschel, A.N.G., Losin, N., Okamoto, K. and Peiman, K., "The evolutionary consequences of interspecific aggression", Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, The Year in Evolutionary Biology, 1289 : 48-68 (2013) [link].

Grether, G.F., "The neuroecology of competitor recognition", Integrative and Comparative Biology, 1289 : - (2011) [link].

Anderson, C.N. and Grether, G.F., "Multiple routes to reduced interspecific territorial fighting in Hetaerina damselflies", Behavioral Ecology, 22 : 527-534 (2011) .