Alice Boyle
alboyle@email.arizona.edu

Background:

I am from Winnipeg, Canada and I received a Bachelor of Music from the University of British Columbia in 1990. I then went on to spend play viola professionally in the Costa Rican National Symphony and the New World Symphony. I have always spent a great deal of time in outdoor pursuits but it wasn’t until my four years in Costa Rica that I got hooked on biology, primarily through birding and accompanying my husband on botanical adventures in Central and South America. In the summer of 1997, I made a major life change by taking a field tech position working on birds and plants in the Southwestern U.S. For the next 3 years I continued to work seasonally in Canada on Marbled Murrelets, songbirds, and working at a banding station, which took me to some incredible places in northern and coastal British Columbia. During the winters, my husband and I were migratory, going on months-long birding, botanizing, and snorkeling trips to various parts of Mexico in our antique VW van. This all came to an abrupt end when I applied to grad school. I am now a PhD student (EEB/SRNR) whose research interests span two main themes. I am interested in the factors causing short-distance bird migration, and the mutualistic interaction between frugivorous seed-dispersing birds and their food plants.     My dissertation work combines these interests in a study of Costa Rican altitudinal migrant frugivorous birds. Some goals of my work-in-progress include answering the following questions:

  • Does diet breadth and diet composition differ between migrant and non-migrant frugivores in any consistent way across lineages?
  • Do plants experience any seed dispersal consequences of altitudinal migration by their dispersers?
  • Are spatial and temporal patterns of altitudinal migration in the White-ruffed Manakin consistent with the predicted pattern if migration was solely due to differences in relative fruit production between elevations?
  • Are hypotheses for migration based on relative arthropod abundance and nest predation risk as or more consistent with the patterns of migration in White-ruffed Manakins as the fruit production hypothesis?
 






  Publications:    
   
  • Boyle, W. A. 2008.  Can variation in risk of nest predation explain altitudinal migration in tropical birds?  Oecologia 154:in press.
   
  • Boyle, W. A., C. N. Ganong, D. B. Clark, & M. A. Hast.  2008.  Density, distribution, and attributes of tree cavities in an old-growth tropical rain forest.  Biotropica 40(2):in press.
   
  • Boyle, W. A., C. Ganong, D. B. Clark, and M. Hast.  2007.  Density, Distribution, and Attributes of Tree Cavities in an Old-Growth Tropical Rain Forest?  Biotropica, in press. 
 
 
   
  • Holland , J. N., J. H. Ness, A. Boyle, and J. L. Bronstein, 2005. Mutualisms as Consumer-Resource Interactions. in P. Barbosa and I. Castellanos, editors. Ecology of Predator-Prey Interactions, Oxford University Press.
   
  • Boyle, A., 2005. Seed images from the Atlantic Slope of Costa Rica. http://eebweb.arizona.edu/grads/alice/SeedPhotos.html.
   
  • Boyle, A., and C. J. Conway, 2003. Avian diversity at the Madrona Pools. Pages 61-72 in Madrona Pools Pulse Study: A rapid environmental assessment at the Madrona Pools, Saguaro National Park . U.S. Dept. of Interior, National Park Service, Tucson , AZ.
   
 

Presentations:
   
  • "Patterns of nest predation risk along a tropical altitudinal gradient". Oral presentation at Ecological Society of America, Montreal, July 2005, and American Ornithological Union, Santa Barbara, July 2005.
   
  • “Influence of diet and habitat in the evolution of migration in the Tyranni (Aves)”. Poster presented at the “Birds of Two Worlds” Symposium (Smithsonian). March 2002
   
  • “Diet breadth and altitudinal migration in Costa Rican frugivorous birds”. Poster presented at the 3 rd North American Ornithological Congress, September 2002.