EEB’s Rudolf wins naturalist society’s Young Investigators’ Prize

EEB’s Rudolf wins naturalist society’s Young Investigators’ Prize
Ecologist recognized for research on structure and dynamics of communities

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

Volker Rudolf, assistant professor in ecology and evolutionary biology, has received the American Society of Naturalists’ prestigious 2008 Young Investigators’ Prize.

Young Investigators’ Prizes recognize outstanding and promising work by researchers who are in their final year of graduate school or who have earned their doctorate in the past three years. The prizes are among the society’s most prestigious honors, and less than a handful are awarded each year.

	VOLKER RUDOLF

Rudolf said he was honored to receive the prize but also surprised.

“When I looked back at the people who had won this, it was very impressive, but there were few ecologists who had won them in the past 20 years.”

Rudolf said most of his work is classified as ecological, but there are elements of evolutionary biology in all his work. “You can’t do just one or the other,” he said, and he takes an equally holistic approach to bridging the gap between theory and empirical research, spending about 50 percent of his time on each.

Rudolf joined Rice in 2007, and his research looks at how complex life cycles influence the structure and dynamics of communities. For example, frogs begin their lives as tadpoles, and the communities of animals that tadpoles compete with for food are not the same communities that frogs compete with.

“The way we typically handle species in ecology is to lump all of these differences into one group, even in cases where the species occupies different ecological niches in successive phases of life,” Rudolf said. “In our group, we take the opposite approach and look at the specific ecological role a species plays during each phase of its life cycle.”

Rudolf said dragonflies provide one of the best examples of how a species’ role can change throughout its life. “They start out eating microorganisms, and they wind up being the top predator in the pond.”

Most of his experimental work has been conducted on aquatic populations, and Rudolf’s lab will begin collecting experimental data this fall from several dozen artificial ponds at a Rice facility about five miles south of campus.

Some of the specific questions he addresses involve the effects of cannibalism. It’s not uncommon for animals to prey on members of their own species — often when they are in a different life phase — and Rudolf said the consequences of cannibalism for the dynamics and structure of natural communities are still poorly understood.

Rudolf said the research allows his group to examine some fundamental questions about biodiversity. For example, are species that occupy multiple ecological niches throughout their lives “keystone species” that are more important for overall diversity than species that occupy just one niche?

“If that’s so, then you could have the same total number of individuals of a keystone species in two ponds, but you could distribute the individuals differently between various life phases and wind up with significantly different effects on the pond’s overall ecology,” he said.

In accepting his prize at the American Society of Naturalists’ Young Investigators’ Symposium in June, Rudolf gave an overview of his work, “The Impact of Cannibalism and Size-Structure on the Dynamics of Communities.”