Robin Tinghitella is especially interested in how environmental change — such as habitat fragmentation, noise and light pollution, and climate change — impacts the mating environment. Stock photo
Robin Tinghitella, a professor in DU’s Department of Biological Sciences, is accustomed to the fact that her research attracts a lot of curiosity. After all, who doesn’t want to learn about the courtship rituals of crickets?
For Tinghitella, mating habits are the perfect hook for introducing students and the public to the complexities of evolutionary biology.
“Animal mate choice is an intriguing subject that’s fun to think about,” she says. “It’s easy for people to understand, and you can use it to draw listeners into more complicated evolutionary topics.”
In her lab, Tinghitella and a team of undergraduate and graduate researchers have amassed a trove of data on the mating habits of crickets and fish. Tinghitella is especially interested in how environmental change — such as habitat fragmentation, noise and light pollution, and climate change — impacts the mating environment.
In one experiment, Tinghitella’s team is raising two sets of crickets: those exposed to simulated traffic noise and those raised in silence. They have found that juvenile female crickets raised in a noisy setting have more trouble locating the mating songs of male crickets upon maturity.
“Environmental change is a huge problem when species can’t keep up,” Tinghitella says. “Small changes in the environment disturb how animals communicate, with drastic results.”
Senior ecology and biodiversity major Aaron Sexton, one of Tinghitella’s student researchers, is especially interested in how her work counters traditional notions of the ways in which species evolve.
“Robin’s lab is really cool because it takes a totally different perspective on evolution,” says Sexton, who with Tinghitella’s encouragement plans to attend graduate school at the University of Louisville, where he will research how plants and fungi interact. “Instead of environmental pressures deciding what organisms look like or how organisms behave, the females in these populations are the stronger driving force. Instead of a male looking the way he does because of predators, a male will actually have this bright red and blue mosaic color pattern because that’s what females like. In grade school you learn about evolution—that it’s this really cool process that creates a stronger population of organisms—but once you really get into it, you realize that it’s a much more complex system.”