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 but also the huge variety of animals and physiological systems that are essential for the ‘comparative’ approach. Alexandra Cones is an author on ‘ The incubation environment does not explain significant variation in heart rate plasticity among avian embryos’, published in JEB. Alexandra conducted the research described in this article while a PhD student in David F. Westneat's lab at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY, USA. She is now a DFG postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr Niels Dingemanse at LMU München, Germany, investigating environmental effects on the expression and covariation of plastic traits.
Alexandra Cones
How did you become interested in biology?
I grew up loving animals, and never grew out of it like my peers. However, I actually took minimal science in high school in favor of taking double-language. When I was applying for universities, I realized my interests really lay in understanding the natural world. I saw the ‘animal behavior’ degree at the University of Exeter and went for it, without knowing how research or academia worked, and this ended up being a fantastic decision. I loved learning about behavioral ecology, got some hands-on experience in my second year working with jackdaws, and decided I wanted to do research. I stayed at Exeter for a Master's by research and had my first real field season out in Australia working on chestnut-crowned babblers, which was a challenging, but very cool experience.
I came back to the USA for my PhD and continued the bird trend by working on both sparrows and ducks. Over my graduate work, I realized I really love the analysis and writing aspects of research. I find it interesting to see what the nuances of the data can tell us about evolutionary theory. I am now about to begin a postdoctoral position at LMU in Germany, and I look forward to growing more as a researcher in a new setting.
Describe your scientific journey and your current research focus
My scientific journey truly began in undergrad when I was immersed in behavioral ecology at the University of Exeter. During my third year, I was placed in Dr Nick Royle's lab for my undergraduate research project. Under his supervision, I dug into variation in the plasticity of parental care using burying beetles. I found the evolution of phenotypic plasticity particularly interesting because all traits are plastic to some degree, so the implications of plasticity go beyond any niche in behavior ecology; it is relevant to all of biology.
During my Master's, I studied variation in the plasticity of both parental care and the development of chestnut-crowned babblers with Dr Andy Russell. This was a crash course in learning the statistics I needed to analyze messy, repeated measures data. My results suggested that parental effects may modify the expression of plasticity in offspring, which inspired my doctoral work using house sparrows and ducks. I sought out Dr David Westneat for my PhD work to seriously build my analytical and conceptual background. Funnily enough, the paper linked to this interview is the chapter of my dissertation that inspired my upcoming post-doc project. My data hinted at an environmental effect on the variation and covariation of multiple traits. I think in order to understand evolution more fully, we need to better understand how genes and environments interact to affect the expression of, and selection on, multiple traits. This is what I plan to explore with Dr Niels Dingemanse for my post-doc.
How would you explain the main findings of your paper to a member of the public?
Two animals of the same species can experience the same environment but respond to it in different ways. Why this occurs is a central question of behavioral ecology. We have found that past experiences can affect how an individual responds to future changes in their environment, and so differences in early experiences may cause a large amount of the variation we see in the behaivor of individuals. This may also be a beneficial process, because individuals that find themselves in different environments may benefit from responding in different ways.
Previous work has uncovered that the temperatures that many reptiles, fish and insects experience during development may affect how they respond to temperature later in life. We tested whether this occurs in birds by artificially incubating duck eggs. We incubated some eggs at a constant warm temperature and incubated some eggs with cycles of warm and cool (to mimic what happens in the wild when the mother leaves the nest throughout the day to find food). We then measured how the embryos later respond to temperature (using their heart rate as a response) and measured how they grew as ducklings.
We found that individuals did differ in how they responded to changes in temperature, but contrary to our expectations, this was not because of differences in the temperatures they experienced during incubation. This suggests that genetic differences, or differences in hormones that the mother puts in the egg before laying, produce the variation in responses that we see. Further, these differences in responses to temperature didn't seem to affect their growth, so it is unclear what the consequences of those differences may be, but they may manifest later in life. In contrast, our work on sparrows suggests that the early incubation environment, not genes or hormones, drives differences in how those embryos respond to their environment. Thus, these results suggest that the reason that individuals differ in how they respond to the environment may be species-specific, and these mechanisms of variation may evolve differently depending on what is beneficial to different species and the environments they experience.
Do you have a top tip for others just starting out at your career stage?
Ask questions! You can only learn when you are honest about what you do not know. No one in the field knows everything, so always be learning. I lacked a lot of confidence during graduate years and was scared to reveal what I did not know in lab meeting or conversations with colleagues. However, over time I gained the confidence to start asking more questions when I didn't know an exact term or concept that someone was talking about, and I have learned much more through this strategy. People are happy to share their knowledge.
What do you like to do in your free time?
Primarily, I enjoy riding horses; I do dressage. I think my interest in behavior sparked my interest in riding because to be a good rider you really need to understand how a horse thinks. My specific interest in dressage probably stems from the same traits that make me like academia and research. Both are quite challenging, and both require a lot of deliberate, focused work to do well. I also generally enjoy getting outside; it is good for my mind to get away from screens and get some exercise. I love walking/hiking as well and do that every day. For indoor activities I sometimes make art; I draw, I crochet. Otherwise, I just like learning, whether that is listening to debates, podcasts or documentaries, or reading books or discussions online.
Alexandra Cones's contact details: LMU München/Department Biology II, Behavioural Ecology, Großhaderner Str. 2, 82152 Planegg-Martinsried, Germany.
E-mail: [email protected]
