Sara Miller
University of Missouri-St Louis, MO·Ecology & Evolution
When similar species share a habitat, how do they avoid competing themselves out of existence? One answer is character displacement.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
- Topics
character displacement
Polistes
paper wasps
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Test whether body color patterns across Polistes paper wasp species fit character displacement or other ecological processes, using a large global dataset of physical traits.
- Collect wasps in U.S. regions with low, medium and high species diversity to test whether trait distributions shift with the mix of wasp species present.
- Experimentally test whether Polistes wasps use body coloration to tell their own species apart from other species.
More about the research
In this evolutionary process, overlapping species shift to use different resources or to look and signal differently. Social wasps eat pest insects, pollinate flowers and feed birds and mammals, yet little is known about what drives their diversity. This question matters more now, as insect numbers decline and both native and invasive wasps spread into new areas.
Why it matters
Learning how paper wasp species divide resources could help predict how changes in wasp numbers and ranges will affect local ecosystems. These changes include native species expanding their ranges and invasive populations spreading worldwide. The findings could also inform conservation at a time of widespread insect decline.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Michael Goodisman
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Ecology & Evolution
Estimate genetic correlations for body-form traits among queens, males, and workers in social insects, testing whether shared genetic architecture constrains how far castes and sexes can diverge in morphology.
Nicholas Mason
Louisiana State University, LA·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Sequence whole genomes from populations of about 30 bird species in Andean Polylepis forests and grasslands to measure how connected populations are across isolated forest patches.
Rafael D'Andrea
Stony Brook University, NY·Ecology & Evolution
Build a trait-based multispecies competition model for soil bacteria in which species take up carbon sources at temperature-dependent rates and exchange byproducts through cross-feeding.
The school
University of Missouri-St Louis: 2 labs on PI Pages, $15M a year on research, 171 research doctorates a year.
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