Environmental variation is becoming more frequent and unpredictable as a consequence of anthropogenic change, yet we currently lack the tools to evaluate the extent to which organisms can adapt to this phenomenon. Adaptations to predictable short-term environmental variation should favour reversible or irreversible (developmental) plasticity, whilst unpredictable long-term environmental variation will favour bet-hedging and adaptive tracking. A fundamental challenge here is in defining such adaptive phenomena for phenotypes that vary hierarchically among species, populations, genotypes and individuals, and also within individuals for repeatedly expressed labile phenotypic traits (behaviour, physiology and morphology). To address this challenge, we combine approaches from behavioural ecology and quantitative genetics, using statistical models and the concept of the reaction norm to explore phenotypic variation among individuals alongside within-individual plasticity in labile phenotypes. Working at the interface between theoretical and empirical research, we are involved in a wide range of activities from the development of mathematical models and wider conceptual frameworks to detailed life history and behavioural studies on vertebrates in the field and laboratory.

Current Research

• Producer-scrounger social behaviour game theoretical modelling and empirical tests in foraging flocks of house sparrows.
• Phenotypic plasticity to predictable and unpredictable environmental variation in evolutionary models and in zebrafish behavioural responses to temperature variation.
• Pace-of-life syndromes (POLS) and phenotypic (co-)variation in eco-evolutionary models of life history, in selected lines of captive zebrafish, and in natural populations of wild house sparrows.