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Marlene Zuk

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Marlene Zuk
Zuk in Palmerston North City Library, 2014
Born (1956-05-20) May 20, 1956 (age 68)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.[1]
CitizenshipUnited States
Alma materUniversity of California, Santa Barbara
University of Michigan
SpouseJohn Rotenberry
AwardsBBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2022)
Scientific career
FieldsEvolutionary biology, behavioral ecology
InstitutionsUniversity of California, Riverside
University of Minnesota
ThesisSexual selection, mate choice and gregarine parasite levels in the field crickets Gryllus veletis and G. pennsylvanicus (1986)

Marlene Zuk (born May 20, 1956) is an American evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist. She worked as professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) until she transferred to the University of Minnesota in 2012. Her studies involve sexual selection and parasites.[2]

Biography

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Zuk was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania[1] and is a native of Los Angeles.[3] She became interested in insects at a young age. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, Zuk started majoring in English, but decided to switch to Biology.[4] After earning her bachelor's degree, she wrote and taught for three years.[5]

In 1982, she and W. D. Hamilton proposed the "good genes" hypothesis of sexual selection.[6] Zuk started attending the University of Michigan in 1986 and earned her Doctor of Philosophy.[5][7] She completed her postdoctoral research at the University of New Mexico.[5] She joined the UCR faculty in 1989.[3] In April 2012, Zuk and her husband, John Rotenberry, transferred to the University of Minnesota, where they both work at its College of Biological Sciences.[4]

Zuk has received honorary doctorates from Sweden's Uppsala University (2010) and the University of Jyväskylä in Finland (2016).[8]

Work

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Research Interests

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Zuk's research of interest deals with the evolution of sexual behavior (especially in relation to parasites), mate choice, and Animal behavior.[2] A recurring theme in Zuk's writing and lectures is feminism and women in science.[4] Zuk is critical of the paleolithic diet.[9] In 1996 Zuk was awarded a continuing grant by the National Science Foundation for an investigation into the ways that variation in females effects sexual selection and what qualities in males indicate vigor.[10]

Women in Science

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Zuk is outspoken about promoting women in science. In 2018, Zuk published an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times. Titled, "There's nothing inherent about the fact that men outnumber women in the sciences,"[11] the article countered recurring suggestions that women are underrepresented in scientific fields due to inherent preferences toward the humanities. By highlighting the inextricable relationship between nature and nurture, she points out the impossibility of attributing female underrepresentation in science to any inborn cause. Citing essential scientific integrity, she argues that until boys and girls are raised under identical circumstances one could not possibly prove any inherent female leanings towards or away from the sciences.[12]

Major scholarship

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Beginning in the early 1990s, Zuk opened avenues for new research with her field work investigating the interactions in Hawaii between the Pacific field cricket Teleogryllus oceanicus and a recently introduced parasitoid fly Ormia ochracea. Zuk recognized "a unique opportunity" to study in real time a trait for which reproductive success and survival success were in conflict.[13] The male crickets used stridulation calls to attract mates, but the calls also attracted eavesdropping female flies. These flies deposited larvae that burrowed into the callers, consuming and killing them within a few days.

Opportunities for scholars attentive to Zuk's work expanded when, in 2003, Zuk and her team found that on one Hawaiian island, Kauai, non-calling Teleogryllus oceanicus male crickets had appeared and were now abundant.[14] A single-locus mutation had altered male cricket wing development, making stridulation impossible. The conferred survival advantage under predator selection had, in fewer than 20 generations, changed the genotype, phenotype, and behavior of 90% of the island's cricket males. Zuk christened the new form "flatwing."[15][16] Since 2006, scholars in various biological disciplines have built on Zuk's foundational work.[17][18][19][20]

Selected works

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Her books and articles include:[2]

  • Heritable true fitness and bright birds: a role for parasites? (1982). Science.
  • Sexual Selections: what we can and can't learn about sex from animals, (2002). University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 978-0520240759.
  • Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are, (2007). Harcourt, Inc., New York. ISBN 978-0156034685.
  • "Can bugs improve your sex life?" (August 1, 2011). Wall Street Journal.
  • Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love and Language from the Insect World, (2011). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York. ISBN 978-0151013739.
  • "Bring on the aerial ant sex" (2012). Los Angeles Times, April 29.
  • "Anthropomorphism: A Peculiar Institution" (2012). The Scientist 26: 66–67.
  • Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live, (2013). W. W. Norton & Company, New York. ISBN 978-0393347920.
  • Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why It Matters, (2022). W. W. Norton & Company, New York. ISBN 978-1324007227.

College Leadership

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Zuk is a professor in the department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior in the College of Biological Sciences. She is the Associate Dean for Faculty.[2]

Awards and honors

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In 2015, Zuk was the recipient of the Edward O. Wilson Naturalist Award by the American Society of Naturalists.[21][22]

Zuk was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017,[23][24] and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019.[25]

The Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology named their scholarship award for outstanding oral presentation in the division of animal behavior after her.[26]

For 2022, she was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award.[27]

References

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  1. ^ a b Henderson, Andrea Kovacs, ed. (2010). "Zuk, Marlene". American Men & Women of Science. Vol. 7 T–Z (28th ed.). Detroit, Michigan: Gale. p. 1078. ISBN 978-1-4144-4558-8.
  2. ^ a b c d "Professor Marlene Zuk". College of Biological Sciences. University of Michigan. Retrieved February 4, 2018.
  3. ^ a b Pittalwala, Iqbal (April 5, 2007). "UCR Newsroom: Can Disease Be Our Friend?". UCR Newsroom. Retrieved March 16, 2013.
  4. ^ a b c Leigh, Blake (May 30, 2012). "CBS hires bug sexpert Marlene Zuk". Minnesota Daily. Archived from the original on November 18, 2012. Retrieved March 16, 2013.
  5. ^ a b c "Dr. Marlene Zuk". X-STEM – Extreme STEM Symposium. USA Science and Engineering Festival. Archived from the original on January 7, 2017. Retrieved March 16, 2013.
  6. ^ Combes, Claude (October 1, 2005). The Art of Being a Parasite. University of Chicago Press. p. 179. ISBN 978-0-226-11438-5. Retrieved May 24, 2013.
  7. ^ "Marlene Zuk". UCR Department of Biology. Retrieved September 9, 2017.
  8. ^ "Finnish University Honors Zuk | College of Biological Sciences". cbs.umn.edu. Retrieved March 8, 2019.
  9. ^ "Scientist says paleo diet is not always based on way evolution really works". news.com.au. May 14, 2015. Retrieved July 26, 2015.
  10. ^ "NSF Award Search: No Award Found". www.nsf.gov. Retrieved March 6, 2020.
  11. ^ "Op-Ed: There's nothing inherent about the fact that men outnumber women in the sciences". Los Angeles Times. March 11, 2018. Retrieved March 6, 2020.
  12. ^ "Marlene Zuk and Susan D. Jones: COVID-19 is not your great-grandfather's flu — comparisons with 1918 are overblown". Greeley Tribune. April 3, 2020. Retrieved May 5, 2020.
  13. ^ Zuk, Marlene; Simmons, Leigh W.; Cupp, Luanne (1993). "Calling characteristics of parasitized and unparasitized populations of the field cricket Teleogryllus oceanicus". Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. 33 (5): 339–343. Bibcode:1993BEcoS..33..339Z. doi:10.1007/BF00172933. S2CID 25964255.
  14. ^ Zuk, Marlene; Rotenberry, John T.; Tinghitella, Robin M. (2006). "Silent night: adaptive disappearance of a sexual signal in a parasitized population of field crickets". Biology Letters. 2 (4): 521–524. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2006.0539. PMC 1834006. PMID 17148278. Presumably owing to the associated mortality, with each field visit since 1991 we heard and observed fewer crickets on that island, and in 2001 only heard a single calling male, with all crickets extremely scarce in intensive searches.... Over a three day visit in 2003, although we heard none calling, crickets were far more abundant than before in their habitat of fields and lawns. Further examination revealed that virtually all Kauai males had female-like wings, lacking the normal stridulatory apparatus of file and scraper required for sound production.
  15. ^ Tinghitella, Robin M. (2008). "Rapid evolutionary change in a sexual signal: genetic control of the mutation 'flatwing' that renders male field crickets (Teleogryllus oceanicus) mute". Heredity. 100 (3): 261–267. doi:10.1038/sj.hdy.6801069. PMID 18000520. S2CID 10725738. The rise of flatwing morphology from negligible in the late 1990s to 91% of the population in 2004 took only 16–20 generations.
  16. ^ Rayner, Jack G.; Aldridge, Sarah; Montealegre-Z, Fernando; Bailey, Nathan W. (2019). "A silent orchestra: convergent song loss in Hawaiian crickets is repeated, morphologically varied, and widespread". Ecology. 100 (e02694): e02694. Bibcode:2019Ecol..100E2694R. doi:10.1002/ecy.2694. hdl:10023/17637. PMID 30945280. S2CID 93000322. Host–parasite interactions are predicted to drive the evolution of defenses and counter-defenses.... The loss of male song in Hawaiian field crickets (Teleogryllus oceanicus) subject to fatal parasitism by eavesdropping flies (Ormia ochracea) is a textbook example of rapid evolution in one such arms race.
  17. ^ Pascoal, S.; Liu, X; Ly, T.; Fang, Y; Rockliffe, N.; Paterson, S.; Shirran, S.L.; Botting, C.H.; Bailey, N.W. (2016). "Rapid evolution and gene expression: a rapidly evolving Mendelian trait that silences field crickets has widespread effects on mRNA and protein expression". Journal of Evolutionary Biology. 29 (6): 1234–1246. doi:10.1111/jeb.12865. hdl:10023/10624. PMID 26999731. S2CID 7553184. We capitalized on a rapidly evolving Hawaiian population of crickets (Teleogryllus oceanicus) to test hypotheses about the genomic consequences of a recent Mendelian mutation of large effect which disrupts the development of sound-producing structures on male forewings.
  18. ^ Fitzgerald, Sophia L.; Anner, Sophia C.; Tinghitella, Robin M. (2022). "Varied female and male courtship behavior facilitated the evolution of a novel sexual signal". Behavioral Ecology. 33 (4): 859–867. doi:10.1093/beheco/arac049. [T]he rapid evolution of sexually selected traits still appears to be relatively rare. The very recent evolution of a novel sexual signal in the Pacific field cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus thus offers a rare opportunity to investigate how males with recently evolved novel sexual signals fare in the context of close one-on-one courtship encounters.
  19. ^ Zhang, Xiao; Rayner, Jack G.; Blaxter, Mark; Bailey, Nathan W. (2021). "Rapid parallel adaptation despite gene flow in silent crickets". Nature Communications. 12 (50): 50. Bibcode:2021NatCo..12...50Z. doi:10.1038/s41467-020-20263-4. PMC 7782688. PMID 33397914. Here, we take advantage of the repeated evolutionary origin and spread of flatwing crickets in multiple Hawaiian island populations to test the expected trade-off between gene flow and rapid parallel adaptation via independent mutational events....
  20. ^ Broder, E. Dale; Gallagher, James H.; Wikle, Aaron W.; Venable, Cameron P.; Zonana, David N.; Ingley, Spencer J.; Smith, Tanner C.; Tinghitella, Robin M. (2022). "Behavioral responses of a parasitoid fly to rapidly evolving host signals". Ecology and Evolution. 12 (e9193): e9193. Bibcode:2022EcoEv..12E9193B. doi:10.1002/ece3.9193. PMC 9366563. PMID 35979522. Here we capitalize on a rapidly evolving interaction between the Pacific field cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus and the acoustically orienting parasitoid fly Ormia ochracea to understand how parasitoids initially respond to novel changes in host sexual signals.
  21. ^ "Zuk receives naturalist award | College of Biological Sciences". cbs.umn.edu. Retrieved March 8, 2019.
  22. ^ "Edward O. Wilson Award". www.amnat.org. Retrieved March 8, 2019.
  23. ^ "Award-Winning Faculty and Staff | College of Biological Sciences". cbs.umn.edu. Retrieved March 8, 2019.
  24. ^ "Marlene Zuk". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved March 8, 2019.
  25. ^ "CCS Alumna Elected to the National Academy of Sciences". Retrieved April 5, 2023.
  26. ^ "Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology". sicb.org. Retrieved March 5, 2020.
  27. ^ "BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award 2022". www.frontiersofknowledgeawards. Retrieved April 5, 2023.
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