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titleboxGERALD BORGIA titlebox

professor pictureProfessor

email:borgia@umd.edu
phone:
301.405.6943 (office)
fax:301.314.9358
office:4226 Bio-Psych
graduate programs: Biology, BEES, NACS
bullet visit lab page   bullet most recent publications


RESEARCH INTERESTS

Dr. Borgia is interested in sexual selection and mate choice and uses bowerbirds as a model system for his studies. Mate choice is a fundamental, but still poorly understood, evolutionary process which is the focus of much debate in evolutionary and behavioral biology. Naturalists, including Darwin, have long been captivated by the unique courtship behaviors of bowerbirds that include construction of a bower, colorful bower decorations, and highly integrated and complex vocal and dancing displays. Developments in Dr. Borgia's lab have allowed the unique aspects of the bowerbird mating system to be used to address many important issues in the study of sexual selection. Using an automated camera system to monitor courtship and mating behavior at 30+ of bowers, members of our lab are able to study in great detail male traits that are important in mate choice, and follow individually marked females as they visit different males for courtship across their lifetimes. This work is combined with genetic studies to address a variety of important issues associated with the mate choice process. Recent and ongoing studies have focused on how males alter courtship displays in reaction to female signals during courtship, age-related differences in how females choose mates, how male intelligence affects his attraction to females, the role of genetic relatedness to neighbors in affecting male choice of display sites, the role of parasites in affecting male display and mate choice, factors influencing decoration stealing and bower destruction, differences between juvenile and adult males in their use of forced copulations, studies of the importance of UV and the visual system in the choice of bower decorations, the significance of mate choice in reproductive isolation, the importance of co-option in display trait evolution, vocal mimicry, and determining the role of MHC allele frequency in mate choice by females. Longer term work is focused on understanding lifetime patterns of female visitation and mate choice at male bowers and factors affecting lifetime male success. The larger goal of this work is to develop more realistic models of the mate choice process.

While Dr. Borgia and his students have done field studies of 13 species of bowerbirds in Australia, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia, prospective students are encouraged to work on satin bowerbirds because of the high proportion of females marked in the Wallaby Creek study population and because of the already rich set of information that can be drawn on in designing research projects. Currently, Dr. Borgia and his students are working with computer scientists to develop programs that will automatically score and process data from video recordings of behavior. This is an exciting new development that will enable us to fully utilize data from these videos to perform the most detailed study of male display and female choice of any species. Extending the use of microsatellite markers will allow quantitative genetic studies of male display.

Recent Publications


Patricelli GL, Coleman SW, Borgia G. 2006. Male satin bowerbirds, Ptilonorhynchus violaceus, adjust their display intensity in response to female startling: an experiment with robotic females Anim. Behaviour 71: 49-59

Borgia, G. and J. Keagy. 2006. An inverse relationship between decoration and food colour preferences in satin bowerbirds does not support the sensory drive hypothesis, Animal Behaviour, 72 : 1125-1133.

Reynolds, S.M., Dryer, K, Bollback, J. Uy, JAC,Patricelli, GL, Robson, T, Borgia, G., & Braun, M.J. 2007. Behavioral paternity predicts genetic paternity in satin bowerbirds (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus), a species with a non-resource-based mating system. The Auk 124(3):857-867.

Borgia, G. 2006. Preexisting Male Traits are Important in the Evolution of Elaborated Male Sexual Display. Advances in the Study of Behaviour 36: 249-302.

Borgia, G. Coyle, B. & Zwiers, P. 2007. The Evolution of Colorful Display. Evolution 61(3): 708-12

Please visit http://www.life.umd.edu/biology/borgialab/index.html for a complete set of downloadable publications .