Current Research

Dispersal among fragmented habitats has far reaching population and evolutionary consequences. I am interested in those factors that influence the ability of organisms to disperse, such as the type of dispersal habitat, interactions with conspecifics, and cues of habitat quality.

Odontotaenius disjunctus, commonly called the bess, betsy, or passalid beetle, is a nice subject for dispersal studies because it is slow-moving, large (~3cm), and abundant, making its movements easy to observe and manipulate.

From a multi-scale regional survey and an intensive within-forest survey, I have found that O. disjunctus is particularly sensitive to microhabitat characteristics, but relatively insensitive to forest abundance and arrangement at the regional scale. This latter finding is surprising considering the poor dispersal ability we have documented for O. disjunctus. On the other hand, we have found through a series of experiments that O. disjunctus has robust within-log population growth and strong perceptual abilities during dispersal.

Growing evidence suggests that a little dispersal can go a long way toward the maintenance of populations in a fragmented environment. I hope to quantify the relationship between landscape characteristics and the optimal suite of dispersal behaviors using an individual based simulation model of dispersal.