I’m a Behavioral Ecologist that has studied parental care, territoriality, male-male combat, vocal communication, mating and courtship in frogs, birds, and fish throughout the Neotropics. In zoos, I designed enrichment for monkeys and frogs, and used positive reinforcement to train monkeys and sea lions, skills that I am now using to study wild hummingbirds!

For my dissertation research I studied maternal care and tadpole schooling in the frog Leptodactylus insularum in Gamboa, Panama. For almost 2 years I followed adult frogs and tadpoles in the swamps, and I found that not all female frogs provide care, but that only tadpole schools that received this facultative care were able to survive to metamorphosis (Animal Behavior, in review). In addition, I documented the unusually rapid growth and development of these tadpoles, thereby adding to the paucity of natural history data on tropical frogs.

Kristiina J. Hurme, Ph.D.

Lecturer

Biology

University of Washington

Seattle, WA 98195

hurme[at]uw.edu

Website design by Kristiina Hurme, 2020.