Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture

Morgan Tingley, EEB, UCLA: "To move, or not to move? How species respond to a warming climate"
2026-05-04 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | 352 Haines Hall
Abstract: When we contemplate how biodiversity is changing, we often focus on the species we have lost entirely. But while we have yet to lose a single bird species to our rapidly changing climate, birds and other creatures are currently adapting and responding in myriad ways. Across the world, species are shifting their geographic distributions, shifting the timing of life history events, and even shifting their body shapes and sizes. Integrating field research and citizen science over decades to centuries, the research presented in this talk demonstrates the complex ways that species are responding to a changing climate, as well as the options that humans have to help species cope with an increasingly dynamic earth system.
Zoom link:
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/94308730584?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 943 0873 0584
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Dr. Kim Zhu: Multi-Omic Investigations of Convergent Human Adaptations to High-Altitude Hypoxia in the Himalayas and Andes
2026-05-18 12:00 - 13:30
Abstract: A long-standing goal within the field of evolutionary genomics has been to understand how genomic and phenotypic differences between human populations arise. High-altitude environments offer a natural experiment to study this question, as these environments impose a number of selective pressures, the most severe of which is high-altitude hypoxia. Human populations residing across the Andean Altiplano, Tibetan Plateau, and Ethiopian Highlands represent three separate replications of this natural experiment, each displaying a unique suite of high-altitude adaptive phenotypes. This talk explores how multi-omic methods can be leveraged to uncover signatures of natural selection and developmental adaptation that have shaped the adaptive phenotypes displayed among high-altitude residing Andean and Himalayan populations. Ultimately, this work highlights how adaptive processes can act across evolutionary and developmental timescales to shape the shared and distinguishing features observed between human populations.
Zoom link:
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/94308730584?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 943 0873 0584
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Ashley Mensing, Dept of Anthropology, UCLA. Title: Early life adversity and life history correlates in wild white-faced capuchins: physiological mechanisms and fitness outcomes
2026-06-01 12:00 - 13:30
Abstract:
Organisms that develop under adversity often differ from their peers in stress physiology, behavior, and reproductive timing. Life history frameworks offer a powerful lens for making sense of this variation, proposing that these differences reflect developmental responses calibrated to early environmental conditions. Yet the mechanistic pathway connecting early adversity to physiological changes to behavioral shifts to life history outcomes has rarely been traced empirically within wild populations, leaving core assumptions about how this process unfolds largely untested.
I draw on long-term data from the Lomas Barbudal Monkey Project in Costa Rica to examine whether early adversity in wild white-faced capuchins (Cebus imitator) generates the downstream physiological, behavioral, and life history changes that these frameworks anticipate. I first characterize early environmental harshness and its relationship to stress physiology, then ask whether physiological variation connects to behavioral and life history shifts in the expected directions. By tracing this pathway empirically in a wild primate, this work offers a window into how and whether the predictions embedded in life history approaches hold when tested mechanistically in a system with rich longitudinal data. These findings have implications for how we study developmental plasticity and the promises and limitations of applying life history frameworks to individual-level developmental trajectories.
This talk will be presented via Zoom:
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/94308730584?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 943 0873 0584
Passcode: [REDACTED]
