Sunfishes of Opinicon: From Mating Tactics to Foraging Ecology

This talk will begin by highlighting the pioneering work of Mart Gross on alternative mating tactics in sunfishes, from his earliest work describing three unique mating tactics, to his subsequent development of an evolutionary model to explain tactic-specific fitness. I will follow with a discussion of my own research including the role of alternative mating tactics in shaping parental care and kin-recognition behaviours, and the contribution of alternative tactics to widespread hybridization between sunfish species. I will further describe the work of J. Allen Keast in understanding the foraging ecology of sunfishes through stomach content analyses, and recent work my lab has done with stable isotopes that draws on Keast’s work and links mating tactics with foraging ecology. Together these data begin to develop a framework that bridges natural and sexual selection to understand diversity in morphology, life history and behaviour of fishes.