Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) serve an important social and economic role in western North America. Despite historical abundance, native salmonids are now at risk of extinction throughout much of their native range. ...

Three manuscripts constitute the following dissertation. Chapter one studied how sympatric grizzly bears and black bears in Yellowstone National Park relied on different food items to meet their energetic requirements. In ...

Convergent phenotypic evolution, the independent acquisition of similar traits in distinct species, is widespread in nature. Phenotypic convergence is a useful model for studying adaptive evolution because these instances ...

Sexual signals are often plastic, and should therefore be adjusted to match an individual's phenotype and optimize lifetime fitness. However, little is known of physiological mechanisms permitting such phenotypic integration, ...

In the western U.S., the Pacific salmonids (Oncorhynchus spp.) are of significant cultural, socioeconomic and ecological importance. However, despite decades of conservation efforts, their continued decline remains a great ...

Relatively little is known about the life histories of cephalopods compared to many other groups of major marine predators such as fish, marine mammals, and sea birds. Increased importance of cephalopods to global fisheries ...

Adaptation to novel and changing environmental conditions is crucial for the persistence and range expansion of species in the context of biological invasions and climate change. Investigating the mechanisms by which ...

Human speech is one of the most important means of communication, and yet we have a poor understanding of how the brain controls speech production and processing. In recent decades, the mouse has become an important model ...

Durine the summer of 1976, the author studied a population of burrowing owls (Speotyto cunicularia) predominately located in Grant County, Washington. Much of what he observed is described in this paper along with a ...