Brandi Pessman

I recently joined the Hebets Lab in 2019 as a PhD student, and I am currently uncertain what my dissertation will focus on. For my undergraduate research, I was interested in sexual selection and mating strategies of multiple cricket species. My undergraduate thesis looked at the effects of juvenile exposure to various population densities on the aggressive behaviors of male Acheta domesticus, the common house cricket. I am currently interested in using spiders to study how multimodal communication is used during reproductive or aggressive interactions. I would also like to investigate how human disruption may be complicating how spiders are able to communicate with one another.