The research topic that I am interested in is the courtship structures that male fiddler crabs build at their burrows to attract females in the mating season. Starting with a study of the semidome structure in Uca lactea in Korea (Kim et al. 2004 J Crust Biol), I tried to determine the evolutionary and ecological cause of courtship structure building in fiddler crabs. I further developed the idea of Dr. John H. Christy that the interaction between predators (grackles) and preys (fiddler crabs) may cause the evolution of courtship structures of the prey species and successfully tested it by manipulating the predation risk on two tropical fiddler crab species. I found that the attractiveness of male signals increases with perceived predation risk. This suggests that the male sexual signal can provide direct survival benefit to females. It was unusual finding because there was a widespread belief that the sexual signals become less attractive under higher predation risk (Kim et al. 2007. PLoS ONE) and this has received attention from several news groups such as New Scientist, Live Science, and Smithsonian Magazine. I recently published a complementary paper related to this subject (Kim et al. 2009. Proc Roy Soc B).
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