UTA biologist wins NSF CAREER grant to study effects of predators on the evolution of Daphnia water fleas

The University of Texas at Arlington News Releases



Matthew Walsh, an assistant professor of biology, has been awarded a five-year, $600,000 grant from the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program.

A biologist at The University of Texas at Arlington who studies ecology and evolutionary biology is the recipient of a prestigious career development grant from the National Science Foundation.
Matthew Walsh, an assistant professor of biology, has been awarded a five-year, $600,000 grant from the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program. His project is titled “CAREER: Does behavioral plasticity promote or constrain adaptation? A test using resurrection,” and will address a long-standing question in evolutionary biology.
“We have known for at least 100 years that organisms are sensitive to changes in environmental conditions and that they will often alter the expression of their traits when conditions change,” he said. “Scientists have long speculated that this ‘plasticity’ plays a key role in ultimate evolutionary responses, but how it does so is not clear. The challenge in answering this question is that you need to observe evolutionary changes as they occur.”
The project will help answer the question by taking advantage of a unique feature of zooplankton biology, Walsh explained. Many species of zooplankton produce resting eggs when conditions deteriorate. A resting egg is an egg that undergoes a period of dormancy during which it is resistant to adverse conditions. These resting eggs sink to the bottom of lakes and accumulate. More importantly, they remain viable for decades or even longer.
Walsh’s research will focus on a system that experienced a recent change in environmental conditions. Lakes in Wisconsin were recently invaded by a dominant invertebrate predator, the spiny water flea or Bythotrephes longimanus. Bythotrephes has decimated populations of Daphnia, a tiny, shrimp-like crustacean also known as the water flea, as its diet consists mostly of Daphnia zooplankton. In previous research, Walsh provided evidence that Bythotrephes drives evolution in Daphnia.
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