Cr ypt-Keeper Wasp Manipulates the Behavior of Its Parasite Host BY ELAINE SHEN
Stepping into Scott Egan’s office can be quite overwhelming. Looking around, no surface is spared — animal skulls, posters, framed insects, journals, teeth, arrowheads, and live samples are just some of the objects he proudly displays in his corner of Rice University’s Anderson Biological Labs. While you might expect such an eclectic collection to be a consequence of traveling far and wide, most of the items actually come from a longtime curiosity and dedication to investigating regions of Texas and the Gulf Coast. As a lifelong Texan, he intentionally sought out local ecological systems in order to answer some of the largest questions in ecology, evolution and conservation biology. You see, Egan, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, has been romping around green spaces in the Greater Houston area since he was a child. When he wasn’t fishing or catching snakes in the San Jacinto River watershed, he was being quizzed about tree species by his father on short hikes in Jesse Jones County Park. Later, during one semester as an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, he found himself taking courses in ecology, evolution, insect biology and bird biology all at once. By the end of that school year, he could not deny the connections between the process-based concepts he read about in his textbooks and the importance of classifying organisms in the field. “After that semester, I was confident that I wanted to explore these concepts in biodiversity professionally to discover how one could find so much diversity in the patch of land that I grew up in,” Egan said. Now at Rice, just 25 miles from where he grew up, Egan is broadly interested in the origin and maintenance of biodiversity through evolutionary processes like speciation, the process by which many species evolve from one common ancestor. His lab group assembles multidisciplinary collaborations in order to tackle ecological systems from different angles, examining how animals change their genetics, behavior, natural history and geographic distribution under different manipulated experimental conditions. The model system they use involves a group of insects averaging just 1.5 to 2 millimeters in length that are as 22 ENQUIRY ❱ WINTER 2019