Corvids are an exceptional model for understanding how lineages diversify and adapt across diverse environments. With more than 150 species distributed across all major global biomes, they exhibit remarkable morphological diversity. As one of the most cognitively advanced animal groups, corvids also provide a powerful system for investigating how cognition — alongside other biological traits — influences ecological and geographic niche expansion.

Enhanced cognitive abilities have evolved independently across multiple metazoan lineages. In each case, species with enhanced cognition exhibit superior problem-solving skills based on flexible, context-dependent behavioral responses. Growing empirical evidence indicates that such behavioral flexibility can confer substantial fitness advantages, particularly in ecological settings where morphological or physiological traits alone are insufficient to exploit resources or persist under challenging conditions, often resulting in expanded ecological niches. At the microevolutionary scale, this flexibility may buffer organisms against novel selective pressures, potentially slowing rates of morphological adaptation. Paradoxically, however, macroevolutionary patterns in clades containing highly intelligent species—such as crows and parrots—reveal elevated rates of morphological diversification, reflecting repeated instances of extreme adaptations to diverse resources and environments. In my lab we explore theoretical frameworks that may reconcile these seemingly contradictory effects of cognition on evolutionary dynamics and test their predictions.

Madagascar and its surrounding archipelagos offer an ideal natural laboratory to explore how the colonization of novel environments unfolds, since within a relatively small region, many groups of organisms occupy a massive array of habitats with different degrees of isolation and ecological complexity.

In this system, we are working on multiple groups of organisms, from the plant genus Croton to the day geckoes of the genus Phelsuma.