Harald Parzer
Graduate Student

My general interest lies in the evolution of diversity, specifically the triggers and the constraints of diversity. Dung beetles provide vast opportunities to study the evolution of diversity: members of the genus Onthophagus are exceptionally species-rich and diverse in regard of their horn morphology. Horns are important structures to win fights in male-male competition, however, they may come at a high energetic cost. Thus, not all individuals within a species can afford to express horns in order to maintain their overall phenotypic composition. I am interested in how resource allocation trade-offs between traits accelerate the divergence of populations, thus facilitating speciation, and how trade-offs shape the morphological diversity. Furthermore, I want to investigate how trade-offs correlate with horn morphology among species. This might be a key to clarifying the evolution of polyphenism itself. Currently I am approaching these questions by a variety of techniques – using developmental-morphological data at the moment; in the future I intend to include behavioural and molecular data to further elucidate the causes and consequences of trade-offs.