Arthur Porto
University of Florida, FL·Ecology & Evolution
Most plants and animals reproduce by mixing genes from two parents, which makes every offspring different. A few species instead reproduce as clones, and cloning is known to be more efficient.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Computer Science
- Topics
asexual reproduction
clonal reproduction
parthenogenesis
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Test whether clonal, all-female ostracode species show more limited trait evolution than two-parent species, using mixed-effect linear models of size and shape data from Late Cretaceous–Paleogene fossils.
- Compare extinction rates between clonal and two-parent ostracode species, applying capture-mark-recapture analysis to occurrences from the literature, databases and unpublished natural history collection samples.
- Develop and share an AI-based tool that automatically measures the size and shape of fossil remains, and evaluate AI approaches for extracting further information from fossil images.
More about the research
Why, then, is strictly clonal reproduction so rare across the tree of life? One long-standing idea is that clonal populations have too little genetic variation to adapt when conditions change, so they die out more often. This prediction is hard to test, because extinction is best studied in fossils, and fossils rarely reveal how an organism reproduced.
Why it matters
The work tests a central idea in evolutionary biology: that clonal species evolve less and go extinct more often. This could help explain why sexual reproduction is so common. Its shared AI tool for measuring fossils from images could make collecting data from museum fossil collections much faster for other researchers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sarah Sheffield
Binghamton University, NY·Ecology & Evolution
Test how ancient climate events affected heterochrony, meaning shifts in developmental timing, in Paleozoic echinoderms, using phylogenetic trees built from museum, database and literature data.
Peter Siver
Connecticut College, CT·Ecology & Evolution
Document new species, physical traits and past environmental conditions for each silica-bearing freshwater protist group in an 82-million-year North American fossil collection, using scanning electron microscopy data.
Brian Scholtens
College of Charleston, SC·Ecology & Evolution
Photograph and database all ~30,000 specimens in the Richard Dominick Lepidoptera collection from South Carolina's Santee Delta, collected 1965–1976, and make the data publicly available.
The school
University of Florida: 65 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 795 research doctorates a year.
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