Marin Science Seminar Presentation: "The Price is Wrong: How a Game Show can Help us Understand the Effects of Climate Warming on Animals" with Alex Gunderson of the Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies (November 19, 2014) Get the flyer here.

The Price is Right is a game show where people can win exciting prizes like cars, vacations, and washing machines. It also happens to provide a great analogy for describing one of the most important problems in biology today: What impact will rising global temperatures have on plants and animals? With the help of "The Price is Right", I will talk about what we are learning about the biology of climate change and give some examples from my own research on tropical lizards.

My current research addresses two primary problems: 1) How do physiology and behavior interact to influence the vulnerability of ectotherms to climate warming? 2) How do divergent climatic habitats shape physiological phenotypes, and how does physiological divergence contribute to evolutionary radiations? I have primarily used Caribbean Anolis lizards as a model system to explore these questions, though I am beginning to use crustacean systems while incorporating genomic analyses of physiological stress.

Alex Gunderson is a physiological ecologist who specializes in thermal biology. Currently he is a Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley. He holds a PhD from Duke University and an MS from the College of William and Mary.