Deborah McLennan

Deborah McLennan is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, She is interested in studying the evolution of communication between males and females during that most intricate of all processes: courtship. Ultimately, she is attempting to uncover how much of the interaction is based upon a (usually male) monologue and how much upon a dialogue between partners. She poses all of her questions from a comparative phylogenetic perspective. This perspective includes three steps: (1) use the phylogenetic tree for the study group to delineate the pattern of courtship character origin and diversification, (2) construct an hypothesis about the forces that have shaped the evolution of courtship behaviours based upon that pattern, and (3) test the hypothesis with a series of experiments. To date, she has concentrated upon the evolution of mate recognition in fishes based upon visual (sticklebacks) and olfactory (swordtails and sticklebacks) cues. She is currently adding an acoustical component (frogs) to her research program.

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