Welcome to my website! I am an ecologist and evolutionary biologist interested in the natural history of plants and their interactions with herbivores and mutualists. I started out as an amateur insect-lover and over the years slowly found my way to studying insects and plants full-time! 

Currently, I am an NSF-PRFB postdoc in Marjorie Weber's lab at Michigan State University. I study evolutionary patterns of stickiness and sand-entrapment in plants and the ecological consequences for herbivorous insects, but with a variety of wonderful collaborators, I have other cool projects in the pipeline as well (pollination! seed dispersal! floral volatiles! fire ecology!).   

I did my dissertation with Rick Karban at UC-Davis and previously worked with Doug Morse, Christine Janis, and Beth Brainerd at Brown University during and after my undergraduate years there.

I am interested in natural history and use that as my primary tool in examining ecological interactions and evolutionary patterns in various plant-insect interactions (herbivory, protective mutualisms, and pollination). I spend a lot of time just poking around, taking pictures, making observations, and collecting plants and seeds; most of my projects and ideas have come from these jaunts. 

My CV is here.

Twitter: @Saab95adventure for my nature, bicycle, and car ramblings. 

Huge post-fireTrichostema laxum!!!

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 Direct and indirect defense of sticky plants and its evolution
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My primary research is on sticky plants which are unequivocally the coolest plants. The insects that live on those plants are unequivocally the coolest insects. 

A great diversity of plants have independently evolved stickiness (hundreds of times), which may be a direct and indirect defense, as well as serve myriad other physiological functions. My research on sticky-mediated defenses concerns two distinct mechanisms.

Insects which incidentally land on the surfaces of sticky plants die and this carrion provides sticky-adapted scavenging predators (spiders, true bugs) with a food source; these same predators reduce the herbivore load on a plant by consumption or interference. Sticky plants in California are marked by a very consistent predator community, which are ecologically not phylogenetically host specific. The interactions between these predators, as well as between predators and herbivores, have interesting and important, but largely unexplored, effects on the plant. 

Additionally, a subset of sticky plants are 'psammophorous' ('sand-carrying') and are naturally coated in a layer of substrate, generally sand. We've found that this covering - entrapped by the same sticky trichomes as insects are - protects the plant against herbivory, but it doesn't seem to be a camouflage, as might be expected. Instead, it acts directly by wearing down mouthparts and slowing growth of the herbivores. 

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