Seira Ashley Adams

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management

Abstract Earth systems are nearing a global tipping point, beyond which the dynamics of biological communities will become unstable. One major driver of instability is species invasion, especially by organisms that act as “ecosystem engineers” through their modification of abiotic and biotic factors. To understand how native organisms respond to mo...

Earth systems are nearing a global tipping point, beyond which the dynamics of biological systems will become unstable. One major driver of instability is species invasion, especially by organisms that act as “ecosystem engineers” through their modification of abiotic and biotic factors. In a mosaic landscape of non-invaded and invaded habitat, eco...

Adaptive radiation provides the ideal context for identifying and testing the processes that drive evolutionary diversification. However, different adaptive radiations show a variety of different patterns, making it difficult to come up with universal rules that characterize all such systems. Diversification may occur via several mechanisms includi...

Background A striking aspect of evolution is that it often converges on similar trajectories. Evolutionary convergence can occur in deep time or over short time scales, and is associated with the imposition of similar selective pressures. Repeated convergent events provide a framework to infer the genetic basis of adaptive traits. The current study...

Much of our knowledge regarding the role of chemicals in species recognition in arthropods is based on a few taxonomic groups, predominantly insect pest species. To investigate the chemical underpinnings of species recognition cues in other arthropods, we conducted mate choice experiments and analyzed the chemical profiles of two species in the lon...

The evolution of pre-zygotic reproductive isolation is a key step in the process of speciation. In many organisms, particularly insects, chemical labels are used as pheromones for species-specific mate recognition. Although an enormous body of knowledge exists regarding the patterns of pheromone chemical ecology, much less is known about the evolut...

Food webs form the basis of biological communities, though empirical research has been hindered by difficulties in quantifying interactions. Metabarcoding from predator gut content extractions with universal primers promises to provide simple and rapid insights into food web interactions. However, the highly overabundant predator DNA often complete...

Recent studies have emphasized that the choosiness of mate-seeking individuals may differ greatly in response to the size and age of both participants. As haplodiploids, parasitoid wasps provide unusual opportunities for studies of mating preferences, since females can produce male offspring without mating, thus changing the consequences of not mat...