Behavioral Ecology Blog

So Bora blogged a few days ago about open access science, commenting that th day may come when grant proposals may become available to formal reviewers and other interested parties much like accepted manuscripts are today..

This struck me 1st off as wrong- the ideas in grant proposals translate into $$, and novel ideas are often funded just because they are novel, so sharing them with other people means that their novelty might be lost.. What if somebody took the my ideas and used them for themselves?

The flip side is that this type of fear inhibits scientific progress. The sharing of ideas is important, and should be encouraged. This is exactly why we publish papers, present at conferences and seminars, and correspond with colleagues. This is great, but still our ability to share and receive ideas is limited by to the people within our discipline (and go to the same meetings, read the same journals, etc.). The question becomes- how do we get our ideas out there… out to ore than just (in my case) Behavioral Ecologists?

One such way is to do exactly this- maintain a blog. Maybe it’s not the best way- maybe not even good way, but I cannot deny that fact that the ideas I present here reach more than just Behavioral Ecologists… The dissemination of ideas- the understanding of nature, and its inner workings is ultimately what most scientists are after..

So in an attempt at sharing- I’ll offer to share my recent grant proposal, a NSF-DDIG (Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant) to interested readers (SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY). Here is a paragraph from the intro.

While multiple studies have established the role of shared environment (pathogens) in generating selection pressure on MHC genes (Dionne et al., 2007; Ekblom et al., 2007), the effects of animal behavior on MHC genes within said environment has been largely overlooked (but see Hambuch and Lacey, 2002; Sommer et al., 2002) This is surprising; as behavior has the ability to either enhance or mitigate pathogen transmission within populations (Eames and Keeling, 2004; Hambuch and Lacey, 2002; Loehle, 1995; Morris and Kretzschmar, 1997). Sexual behavior is one such behavior that can alter the risk of infectious disease. Although increased number and concurrency of sexual partners has been linked to increased pathogen transmission (Kalichman et al., 2007; Morris and Kretzschmar, 1997; Nelson et al., 2007), no one has explicitly linked this with selection and MHC polymorphism. I will determine whether this increased risk for infectious disease is associated with enhanced strength of selection and increased polymorphism of MHC genes. My study is one of the first to use naturally occurring variation in sexual behavior among congeners to explore the effects of these forms of contact on selection for MHC diversity, and will focus on two specific questions:

1. What is the relationship between sexual behavior (mating system) and MHC variability?
2. What is the relationship between shared environments (pathogens) and MHC variability?

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