For my MS thesis, I worked under Dr. Richard Seigel and studied the reproductive biology and population demography of dusky gopher frogs, Rana sevosa. My PhD co-advisors were Drs. Richard E. Broughton and Janalee P. Caldwell. My dissertation research focused on within- and among- population-level genetics of crawfish and gopher frogs.
Photos by Mike Redmer
For my dissertation research, I worked in the LODGE
and used microsatellite DNA to investigate various population-level genetic aspects of an isolated population of US
Endangered, IUCN critically endangered
(CR)
Dusky Gopher Frogs,
Rana sevosa. Click here for a chromatograph of DNA sequence of a microsatellite locus
of R. sevosa (actual repeat shown as highlighted). One aspect of my dissertation addressed effects of isolation on
contemporary genetic variability by comparison to non-isolated populations of the sister species of R. sevosa (R. capito)
and their sister species (R. areolata). Other aspects focused on temporal variation (over ten years) in genetic structure and relationships between individual genetic variability and fitness.
