The wonder of migration has long captivated our imaginations. From birds tracing invisible highways across the sky to whales travelling vast distances through the oceans, animals follow timeworn, ancestral routes between feeding and breeding grounds. These remarkable movements connect ecosystems, span hemispheres, and bridge evolutionary histories, yet the ecological and evolutionary forces underpinning them remain shrouded in mystery. Why did migration evolve in some lineages but not others? What environmental contrasts set these journeys in motion? And how did shifting oceans and climates over geological time influence the emergence of these seemingly timeless passages?
To address these questions, I study the evolution of long-distance migration in cetaceans as a postdoctoral researcher in Macroecology and Palaeobiology with Professor Erin Saupe. I seek to better understand how environmental conditions have shaped migratory behaviour by modelling seasonal ecological niches in extant whales and tracing their evolutionary history across the clade. By integrating fossil evidence with cutting-edge palaeoclimate reconstructions, my research aims to infer ancestral ranges and illuminate when, where, and under what conditions migration first emerged.
More broadly, my research explores how species respond to environmental change across spatial and temporal scales. I am particularly interested in how ecological models can reveal historical patterns and drivers of species distributions and movements, and in how these insights can deepen our understanding of species’ resilience under accelerating climate change.
