Elizabeth Pringle

Appointment: 2011 to 2014
Natural Resources and the Environment, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

I am interested in understanding how and why the costs and benefits of mutually beneficial interactions between organisms vary with environmental and historical context, and what the consequences of this variation are for ecosystems and coevolutionary processes. Symbiotic ant-plant mutualisms, in which plants provide cavities and food for nesting ants and ants defend plants against herbivores, are wonderful systems for investigating variation in costs and benefits of mutualism. Much of my work in this area has focused on a specialized, symbiotic mutualism among the tropical tree Cordia alliodora, Azteca ants, and plant-sap-feeding scale insects in Latin America. I have studied the effects of scale-insect abundance, ontogeny, climate, and population history on the interaction, and I am now working on the role of nutrient exchange between plants and ants in generating variation in interaction outcomes, and on the consequences of such variation for the surrounding community. Understanding what causes context-dependent variation in species interactions is key to understanding how ongoing climate disruption and habitat loss will affect ecological systems. I received by A.B. in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard University in 2004, and my Ph.D. in Biology from Stanford University in 2011.