Faculty Spotlight: Jessie Tanner
Faculty Spotlight: Jessie Tanner
Tree Frog Communication in Complex Environments
Jessie Tanner joined the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in August 2022 as an assistant professor, dually appointed in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Psychology. An animal behaviorist, Tanner conducts research on the evolution of acoustic communication. She works with animals like frogs and crickets, in which males call or sing to attract females, who in turn use the sounds to choose mates. By experimentally manipulating the sounds and observing how females make mating decisions, the Tanner lab studies how communication is evolving in nature.
As a researcher, Tanner is especially interested in how acoustic communication systems evolve in realistically complex environments. One aspect of this environmental complexity is the noise in the raucous frog choruses that form in the spring. Another is the sheer number of call traits that vary in important ways; individuals may be forced to make less-than-ideal mating decisions if they can’t find all their desired traits in the same partner. Finally, individuals do not produce their calls the same way every time. Some traits are quite inconsistent within individuals, even over the span of a few minutes. A major focus of Tanner’s recent research has been understanding when and how this inconsistency might conceal the differences among individuals. All of these aspects of environmental complexity may affect how signals evolve.
Tanner is focusing on tree frogs native to East Tennessee, including the two closely related species of gray tree frogs. Before joining UT, she investigated mate choice in the livebearing, clonal fish called the Amazon molly; American black bears’ response to the noise made by drones; why some Pacific field cricket males in Hawaii have lost the ability to sing; and the changing shape of the baculum (penis bone) in rodent species native to Australia.
She was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and her studies have taken her to such far-flung institutions as the University of Oklahoma (Norman), Université Bordeaux III Michel-de-Montaigne (Bordeaux, France), the University of Minnesota (Saint Paul), and the University of Western Australia (Perth).
Tanner’s interest in acoustic communication is defined very broadly, ranging from animal behavior to human language, linguistics, and music. She is an avid learner of Cherokee as a second language, holds a Bachelor of Arts in French, and participates in several communities of language learners and linguistics aficionados. A big fan of live music and an amateur guitarist, Tanner always has a song stuck in her head.