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Dr. Maydianne Andrade has the novel job of studying cannibalistic
spiders. She was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and immigrated with her parents to
Vancouver, Canada, when she was 3 years old. She earned a BSc from Simon Fraser
University and an MSc at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. She then
moved to the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University from
which she received a PhD in 2000. She is now Associate Professor of Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, where she
uses her spiders as models for understanding the evolution of mating behavior
in all types of animals.
Work in Dr. Andrade's lab includes studies asking how sexual
selection, social interactions, and ecological conditions interact to affect
the evolution of mating systems. Understanding how male mating investment and
the types of adaptations that arise in response to extreme constraints on
mating success and variance in reproductive success that vary significantly depending
on the species involved can lead to insights in behavior of many species
including our own. Understanding the response of animals to selection under
constraint can provide important insights into the operation of sexual and
natural selection under less extreme conditions. Dr. Andrade's main study
are the black widow spiders (genus Latrodectus).
Dr. Andrade was picked to be one of Popular Science magazine's 2005
Brilliant 10. She has also been the recipient of the Outstanding New
Investigator Award (Animal Behavior Society), the Pitelka Award for Excellence
in Research (International Society for Behavioral Ecology), and a Premier's
Research Excellence Award (Government on Ontario).
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