Citizen Starling

The majority of my work at the Michigan Society of Fellows centers on my book project, Citizen Starling: The scientific politics of invasion in the Progressive Era (1890-1920). In this work, I reconstruct the invasion history of US starlings, and in particular how biologists responded to these European migrants in the first three decades of their residence in the US. As a biologist and a European settler myself, I reflect on our ethical commitments in solving the “wicked problem” of biological invasions in the Anthropocene.

Predicting invasion success

The European (or Common) starling has successfully invaded nearly every continent, establishing itself in urban centers, spreading into the arid outback of Australia, and dominating the pastures of North America. Happily for the many researchers and managers attempting to control the starling’s spread, we have used genetic and isotopic methods to reconstruct what might facilitate such success. My PhD focused on interpreting genomic patterns from whole-genome and reduced-representation sequencing of starling invasions, and I am currently generating new models of starling invasion to better understand how genetic bottlenecks interact with other evolutionary mechanisms to facilitate invasion and expansion.

On this project I work with a large team of starling researchers, including but not limited to Katarina Stuart and Lee Ann Rollins (University of New South Wales, Australia), David Clayton (Clemson University, USA), and Scott Werner (US Dept. of Agriculture, USA).