ECR Spotlight is a series of interviews with early-career authors from a selection of papers published in Journal of Experimental Biology and aims to promote not only the diversity of early-career researchers (ECRs) working in experimental biology during our centenary year but also the huge variety of animals and physiological systems that are essential for the ‘comparative’ approach. Ralph Lacerda de Albuquerque is an author on ‘ Lower-level predictors and behavioral correlates of maximal aerobic capacity and sprint speed among individual lizards’, published in JEB. Ralph conducted the research described in this article while a PhD student in Theodore Garland, Jr’s lab at University of California, Riverside. He is now a postdoc in the lab of Daniel Oliveira Mesquita at Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Brazil, investigating how animal morphology and physiology have been shaped by past natural and sexual selection and how they limit animals’ capacities and influence their behavior.
Ralph Lacerda de Albuquerque
Describe your scientific journey and your current research focus
I have always been interested in ecological and evolutionary physiology and the back and forth between animal and the environment, as mediated by behavior. For my undergrad thesis, I compared the diet composition of Tropidurus hispidus (Squamata: Tropiduridae) populations from the Atlantic and Amazonian Forests. During my Master's in Dr Daniel Mesquita's lab, I compared diet, reproductive cycle, body size and body temperature of T. hispidus and Ameivula ocellifera from Atlantic Forest, Caatinga and restinga environments. In 2019, when Brazil had a progressive and non-authoritarian government, I was awarded a national fellowship called Science Without Borders, which allowed me to pursue my PhD in Dr Theodore Garland's lab. There, I started to understand better how animals function. I became more interested in how their capacities (e.g. sprint speed) emerge from suborganismal traits (e.g. limb lengths, organ masses, muscle biochemistry), and how capacities constrain their behavior (e.g. speed chosen to run). I focused on understanding how maximal aerobic capacity during exercise (V̇O2,max) correlates with ecology and behavior, both within and among species. Now, I am applying all the squamate ecology and physiology I learned so far to predict the distribution of Caatinga lizard species in the future, considering their thermal physiology and climate change predictions.
How would you explain the main finding of your paper to a member of the public?
Did you know some lizards do push-up displays to impress each other? That's how they determine who gets the best territory and who to date. It makes sense in the wild, where resources are limited and predators can come from all sides and from above. The display works as a signal that indicates how physically fit each one is for combat in general. Females like males that do a lot of push-ups in a row, and other males are generally scared of vigorously displaying individuals. Given the importance of that signal, I decided to investigate how capacities for locomotor performance could influence the push-up display behavior. At first, I thought the number of push-ups in a row would be related to strength or some other measure of anaerobic capacity. But it was actually related to resistance or endurance. I found out that the number of push-ups they can do in sequence was correlated to their aerobic capacity during exercise, but not to sprint speed (an anaerobic type of exercise). That makes sense, if we think that they are doing that for a long time during the day. I like to imagine it as high-intensity interval training. Do push-ups, check if females are impressed, rest a bit, do more push-ups! No pain, no gain.
What are the potential implications of this finding for your field of research, and is there anything that you learned during this study that you wish you had known sooner?
I hope my research brings more attention to the importance of aerobic capacity in animals that are thought to be mostly reliant on anaerobic capacities, as is the case for reptiles in general. When we think of sit-and-wait foraging lizards (such as Sceloporus occidentalis), we imagine a mostly inactive animal that just waits for insects to pass by, so they can sprint and catch them. My finding shows that aerobic capacity can also be an important trait for them, and that they probably have busy lives, at least during the breeding season.
Sceloporus occidentalis wearing a mask right before a maximal oxygen consumption during exercise trial. Photo credit: Ralph L. Albuquerque.
Which part of this research project was the most rewarding/challenging?
I remember a few challenges that felt good to overcome. Learning the biochemistry protocols in practice was no fun, and sometimes I just didn't know what went wrong when an assay failed. So, seeing those straight lines on the enzyme assay graphs felt really good. Driving 14 hours to sleep in my van for a month and then driving 14 hours back with 44 lizards was tiring, but it was fun.
Are there any important historical papers from your field that have been published in JEB? If so, which paper, and how did it pave the way for later research?
Garland and Kelly (2006; doi:10.1242/jeb.02244) might not be old enough to be considered ‘historical’, but Ted surely is. Jokes aside, this article really helped me frame how selection acts on organisms. Understanding that the entire organism is targeted by selection, instead of thinking about each trait separately, and understanding that selection acts first and more strongly on higher levels of biological organization (e.g. behavior and performance), really influenced my ideas when thinking about phenotypic evolution and adaptation.
What do you think experimental biology will look like 50 years from now?
That's a tough one! It is hard to predict the future path of knowledge that far ahead, but thinking about the technology we have today and how it might become cheaper and more precise, a few things come to mind. Smaller and cheaper sensors and geolocation devices might be widely used to measure home ranges and locomotion in nature for small and elusive animals, maybe even gather physiological data throughout the day (some kind of lizard fitbit?). Add that to increased processing capacity of super computers, and we will be able to analyze massive amounts of data and create increasingly complex models using organismal, environmental and ecological information.
If you had unlimited funding, what question in your research field would you most like to address?
Oh, if I'm allowed to dream, I would like to understand how physiology and whole-animal capacities interact with the environment and limit future species distributions. That would require a massive amount of data at different levels of biological organization (suborganismal, whole-animal performance and behavior), as well as environmental data across their distribution (operative temperatures, air humidity, solar radiation, air temperatures, etc.) and a super computer to analyze it all together. But this would be as close as we could get to understanding how and why lizards are able to live in their current distribution areas and predict where they would not be able to live in the future. Then we could make better decisions regarding conservation areas.
Ralph Lacerda de Albuquerque's contact details: Departamento de Sistemática e Ecologia, CCEN, Universidade Federal da Paraíba, 58051-900, João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil.
E-mail: [email protected]
