Phenotypic plasticity and maternal effects in spatially varying environments

Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of an organism to adapt its phenotype - its observable characteristics, such as body size or growth rate - to its environment during its lifetime. Maternal effects can be described as the effects of a mother’s phenotype on her offspring’s phenotype through pathways other than direct genetic transmission, for example through epigenetic changes in the DNA, resource transmission in the womb, or behavioural responses to offspring behaviour. The aim of this project is to explore the effect of variable habitat quality on the evolution of phenotypic plasticity and maternal effects so as to understand better how populations adapt to spatially varying environments.

This project will be supervised within the Mathematics in Biology and Medicine research group (http://www.southampton.ac.uk/maths/research/groups/mathbio.page).