I plan to take new graduate students in the spring or fall of 2026.

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I plan to take new honours students for the fall 2026. If you are interested in honours projects, please click here.

Please note: I am currently unable to take on international students unless they have fellowship support already in place.

Graduate work in our lab is intense – we seek extremely motivated students who have demonstrated an ability to take projects from beginning to end and who have a passion for understanding nature.

Students who are interested in pursuing graduate studies should email me with a resume or cv, a brief description of their graduate project interests, and a university transcript (unofficial is fine). Please note that I am sometimes slow to respond to emails, particularly during peak teaching times.

Here are a few potential graduate projects that we hope to pursue:
 

(1) Breeding versus feeding: understanding the ecology of Nicrophorus burying beetles through surveys

Surveys of burying beetles typically bait traps and record the species that come in. Many of the beetles that respond to the baited traps are non-reproductive, and yet the greatest challenge for Nicrophorus is securing a carcass for reproduction. The goal of this study is to repeat the 2017 intensive surveys of 100 block-randomized points across the Queen's University Biological Station properties (sampled 4 times from mid April to late October), recording which species secure mice carcasses for breeding rather than which species respond to bait. Resurveying with an eye for reproduction will allow us to estimate when and where each Nicrophorus species breeds, and allow us to contrast breeding results with the results from the 2017 general trapping surveys. 

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(2) Does adaptation to the cold compromise competitive ability in Nicrophorus carrion beetles?
Based on Jill Wettlaufer's graduate work, we now know that the early season specialist, N. sayi, can stay active at cold temperatures, even at temperatures below freezing. Later in the spring, however, N. sayi loses most carcasses (their key resource for reproduction) to N. orbicollis. Size determines who wins aggressive contests for carrion, but N. orbicollis is not much larger, on average, than N. sayi. Instead, N. orbicollis is much more abundant, and thus the largest individual coming to claim a carcass later in the season is usually N. orbicollis. Does cold tolerance compromise abundance in N. sayi, and if yes, how? This work would require artificial selection experiments in the lab, selecting for large brood size and fast reproduction (sayi) and cold tolerance (orbicollis).

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​(3) Key adaptations and primary challenges for marsh-breeding Nicrophorus beetles

Challenging or extreme environments typically require key adaptations that allow some organisms to persist. Identifying the primary challenges of extreme environments is important to link adaptations with selective pressures. Wetlands present a major challenge for breeding burying beetles that typically bury small vertebrate carcasses in soil or under vegetation for breeding. The key challenge of wetlands appears to be water, but how and why water constrains beetles is poorly understood. This study will examine reproductive success of Nicrophorus in different marshes, identifying rates of failure and their causes across the breeding season. The work will test the hypothesis that periodic flooding is a major selective pressure acting on marsh-breeding Nicrophorus, and that competition for carcasses (with other insects in particular) intensifies with season and ambient temperature. The project will require measures of water level variation over time in each marsh, along with precipitation and temperature measurements.

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(4) What determines the range limits of species?

Several species of Nicrophorus burying beetle reach the limits of their geographic distributions in Ontario. What limits the distributions of these species? This project would use reciprocal transplant experiments in nature to test among alternative hypotheses to explain the geographic limits of two species, one species that reaches it's southern limit in central Ontario, and another species that reaches its northern limit in central Ontario.

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(5) Indirect interactions between burying beetles and salamanders

Indirect interactions among species, where one species impacts another through a third species, are thought to be important in nature, but are often difficult to identify and measure. In our work on burying beetles, we discovered that salamanders (and spiders, some frogs) use small vertebrate carcasses as a lure, apparently feeding on small flies (and possibly other invertebrates, like crickets) that are attracted to the carcass. Once the burying beetles find the carcass, however, they rapidly bury it, removing the lure (and most other invertebrates) for salamanders to use. This project would experimentally test the impact of burying beetles on salamanders, mediated by a shared resource (carcasses) that provides different benefits to each species. Specifically, the work would require videoing salamander behaviour at and away from carcasses, and nighttime removal experiments of burying beetles from carcasses in early spring to record the impacts of beetles on salamander behaviour.​

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(6) Abundance and the distinct ecologies of islands 

Islands represent unique environments that have provided important insights into the ecology and evolution of organisms. The combination of isolation and relatively small area is thought to have created a smaller pool of species on islands, where they are more abundant than on the continental mainland. But some island populations are not denser or more abundant on islands, leading to the question: how widespread is higher abundance on islands, and what explains the variation among species? This project would not involve fieldwork (sadly), but would require using community science data on birds to test these ideas across the globe. The work would also require compiling data to test among alternative hypotheses to explain variation in the island-abundance pattern across species with populations on both continents and islands.​

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(7) Aggression in hummingbirds

Hummingbirds are notoriously feisty, fighting among individuals of the same and different species for access to food. This project would develop artificial intelligence (AI) tools to automate recordings of aggressive interactions among hummingbirds at feeders from video. The work would involve modifying AI vision models (YOLOv8; https://yolov8.com/) to identify hummingbird species coming to a feeder (and in some cases sex and age them as well) and identify aggressive interactions and who wins. Students should have some familiarity with Python and AI. Data generated from these models will be used to test how rates of aggression vary within versus between species, and as a function of resource availability.

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