Department News
Elizabeth Pringle
- Assistant Professor
Michigan Fellow
Contact information
- University of Michigan
1137 Kraus Natural Science Building
830 North University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1048 - Phone: (734) 764-6219
Fax: (734) 763-0544 - Email: epringle@umich.edu
Research interests
The dynamics of interactions between species depend on environmental and historical context. I am interested in understanding how and why the costs and benefits of mutually beneficial interactions between species vary with context and what the consequences of this variation are for ecosystems and coevolutionary processes.
Symbiotic ant-plant mutualisms, in which plants provide cavities and food for nesting ants and ants defend plants against herbivores, are wonderful systems for investigating variation in costs and benefits of mutualism. Much of my work in this area has focused on a specialized, symbiotic mutualism among the Neotropical tree Cordia alliodora, Azteca ants, and phloem-feeding scale insects. This system is widely distributed across tropical Latin America and is particularly common in seasonally dry tropical forests in Western Mexico and Central America. I have studied the effects of scale insects, ontogeny, geography, and population history on the interaction, and I am now working on the role of nutrient exchange among partners in generating variation in interaction outcomes, and on the consequences of such variation for the surrounding community.
