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Congrats to Ben Fitzpatrick for his recent paper in BMC Ecology, co-authored with a team of high school students.
Congrats to Ben Fitzpatrick for his recent paper in BMC Ecology, co-authored with a team of high school students. In the study, Ben and colleagues asked why would two distinct cryptic forms persist in the same environment? Several species of small, slender salamanders come in two forms (striped and unstriped), and the reasons for this polymorphism have stymied generations of herpetologists. They manipulated the relative abundance of model salamanders with and without stripes and found that birds tended to prey disproportionately on the more abundant form. This resulted in a survival advantage for the rare form and thus maintenance of the polymorphism. Farragut High students Kim Shook and Reuben Izally worked on this project as Pre-Collegiate Research Scholars.