Postdoctoral Research Award 2024

Ahva Potticary, a postdoctoral scientist in the Department of Entomology, explores how complex behaviors evolve and how behavior influences evolution, using the parental care behavior of the burying beetle Nicrophorus orbicollis as a study system. The evolution of parental care is expected to proceed through the co-option of existing behaviors, which indicates the use of genes that influence those behaviors in the first place. Potticary tested this idea by determining whether the genes that express inotocin—the insect equivalent of the “bonding hormone” oxytocin/vasopressin—are also used for parenting, publishing her results in the journals Royal Society Open Science and Evolution. Potticary also investigated how behavior may influence evolution by studying how poor parental care influences subsequent generations, published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Lastly, Potticary conducted field research at Whitehall Forest, publishing these findings in Ecology and Evolution, which she has joined as associate editor.