Summary
As with so many biologists, my first love was dinosaurs. As a teenager, after spending my summers catching frogs, turtles, and snakes in nearby forest preserves, I became extremely interested in ecology and evolution, and pursued biology as an undergraduate. In graduate school, I became fascinated with the ways in which organisms adapt to their biophysical environments, and began studying populations of lizards living on islands off the coast of Honduras and The Bahamas. During my postdocs, I set up two large field-experiments where my colleagues and I transplanted thousands of lizards to small islands that vary in local climate to understand the mechanisms that facilitate adaptation to rapid environmental change. We have now expanded these experiments to cover a broad range of questions in contemporary evolutionary biology, from the genomic mechanisms of physiological adaptation to the evolution of behavioral syndromes in response to changes in predation pressure.
Research interests
Research in my lab tends to fall under the broad umbrella of the following question: How do organisms respond to rapid changes in their environments? Given the profound impact that humans are having on the modern world, this is clearly a question that is relevant to conservation biology. But it is also a basic science question. Organisms have had to survive "natural" episodes of rapid environmental change throughout their histories, for example, they experienced sudden climate oscillations during the Pleistocene that resulted in severe temperature swings. Why have some species survived these dramatic changes in their past environments whereas others perished? How will species compensate for similar changes in the future? Research in my lab uses laboratory and field experiments to address various mechanisms of adaptation, including behavior, phenotypic plasticity, and genetic change. We work primarily with Anolis lizards in the Neotropics, but we are not wedded to a single system. We have also worked with insects and snakes, and will always remain open to new avenues of scientific inquiry to address the questions that fascinate us.
Selected publications
- Logan ML. 2019. Did pathogens facilitate the rise of endothermy? Ideas in Ecology and Evolution, (12) 1-8.
- Fey SB, Vasseur DA, Alujevic K, Kroeker KJ, Logan ML, DeLong JP, O’Connor MI, Peacor S, Rudolf VHW, Selden RL, Sih A, Clusella-Trullas S. 2019. Opportunities for behavioral rescue under rapid environmental change. Global Change Biology, (25) 3110-3120.
- Logan ML, Curlis JD, Gilbert AL, Miles DB, Chung AK, McGlothlin JW, Cox RM. 2018. Thermal physiology and thermoregulatory behaviour exhibit low heritability despite genetic divergence between lizard populations. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, (285) 20180697.
- Logan ML, Duryea MC, Molnar O, Kessler B, Calsbeek R. 2016. Spatial variation in climate mediates gene flow across an island archipelago. Evolution, (70) 2395-2403.
- Logan ML, Fernandez SG, Calsbeek R. 2015. Abiotic constraints on the activity of tropical lizards. Functional Ecology, (29) 694-700.
- Logan ML, Cox RM, Calsbeek R. 2014. Natural selection on thermal performance in a novel thermal environment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, (39) 14165-14169.
- Logan ML, Huynh R, Precious R, Calsbeek R. 2013. The impact of climate change measured at relevant spatial scales: new hope for tropical lizards. Global Change Biology, (19) 3093-3102.
View all publications on Mike Logan's Google Scholar profile
Education
- Ph.D., Biology, Dartmouth College, 2014
- M.S., Biology, University of Texas-Arlington, 2009
- B.A., Zoology, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, 2007
- A.S., Biology, College of Lake County, 2005