Luke Anderson

Expertise

Evolution • Sexual Selection • Behavioral Ecology • Lekking • Population Genetics

I am an evolutionary biologist fascinated by the myriad behaviors, plumages, mating signals, and life history strategies of birds, as well as the processes and tradeoffs that give rise to them. In addition to investigating these fundamental processes, I am working to uncover the mechanisms that maintain (or deplete) genetic variation in natural populations, as this variation is the raw material with which species can adapt to environmental change. Improving our understanding of how evolution plays out in the wild is key to developing informed conservation strategies and assessing which species and populations are at highest risk. 

Previously, I spent my PhD working alongside community members in the Chocó rainforests of northwest Ecuador studying White-bearded Manakins, an explosive little bird with an unusual mating system. Among the goals of this research was gaining insight into the longstanding “paradox of the lek”—that is, how genetic diversity is maintained in a population despite only a small fraction of males contributing to the gene pool each generation. I also worked with colleagues at Smithsonian to assess whether reductions in population genetic diversity on the male-biased sex chromosome can be used as a genomic index of male reproductive skew in manakins and other avian lineages. As a Rose Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell, I am leveraging genomic tools to investigate another puzzling evolutionary phenomenon in manakins: losses of male plumage ornamentation. Male transitions to drab, female-like plumage (i.e., losses in sexual dichromatism) are relatively common in birds and have occurred several times across the manakin family, yet current theory is poorly equipped to explain these occurrences in groups where, typically, only the flashiest males pass on their genes. 

Another of my lines of research involves studying the ongoing evolution of Darwin’s finches on the small island of Daphne Major, Galápagos. In this inhospitable desert environment, natural rather than sexual selection dominates, and individuals with certain beak characteristics are better able to acquire food, survive, and reproduce. Despite this strong environmental pressure, one species (the Medium Ground-Finch, Geospiza fortis) harbors considerable diversity in beak-related genetic loci, raising questions about the mechanisms maintaining variation in such an ecologically important trait. This work, conducted with the Enbody Lab in the Computational Biology Department, combines field-based ecological and behavioral methods with modern computational genomics to examine how the processes of selection, adaptation, and hybridization shape the eco-evolutionary trajectories of species on Daphne. 

Education: 

PhD, Ecology & Evolutionary Biolog, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana 
MS, Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
BA, Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts