Robert D. Montgomerie, Queen’s University
Department of Biology
Professor
Kingston, Ontario
mont@queensu.ca
Office:
(613) 533-6127
Expert In
Bio/Research
More than 130 years ago, Charles Darwin suggested that some plant and animal features might help individuals to obtain mates, even though those traits were detrimental to survival. Such ‘sexually selected’ traits, he said, are thus very different from survival traits that resulted from natural s...
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Bio/Research
More than 130 years ago, Charles Darwin suggested that some plant and animal features might help individuals to obtain mates, even though those traits were detrimental to survival. Such ‘sexually selected’ traits, he said, are thus very different from survival traits that resulted from natural selection. Even though this was a major scientific discovery, it was largely ignored for more than a century for both sociological and scientific reasons. The past 30 years, though, has seen a major resurgence of interest in sexual selection due to the development of both sophisticated theories that make a variety of interesting predictions and new experimental, molecular and observational techniques that allow us to thoroughly test those theories. Our research focuses on both precopulatory (mate attraction) and postcopulatory (fertilization) characteristics of animals to test and develop theory that will help us to better explain the diversity of animals that have evolved as a result of sexual selection. Our current research addresses two general questions: (1) Why is there so much variation in colour within and among species of birds? and (2) Why does the size, structure and behaviour of sperm vary so much
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