Meeting Abstract
Unlike you and I, many animals form physiologically-integrated colonies of asexually-iterated modules – to me a bizarre and fascinating evolutionary trajectory that has resulted in complex and aesthetically-inspiring forms. This has motivated questions such as what drove the evolution of such a distinct life history? And what are the consequences of iterating units or modules to achieve an increase in organismal size and the associated development of differing colony architectures? This led me to examine how variation in both ecological settings and colony morphologies impact resource acquisition – employing this as an approach for understanding the consequences and perhaps drivers of coloniality in the animals that we can study today. In this talk I will focus on how I have periodically tackled this issue from its infancy inception as a PhD student to more recent times.
