Anthony DiMeglio

Research Interests

I am a herpetologist interested in questions of behavioral ecology, biogeography, conservation, and morphology. At the start of my undergraduate career at Wayne State University, I surveyed frog populations across the state of Michigan, helping monitor the negative effects of pollutants and algal blooms. Later at the University of Michigan, my love for herpetology flourished further working at the Museum of Zoology Division of Amphibians and Reptiles, home of the largest existing museum collection of snakes in the world. For my undergraduate thesis, I studied sexual dimorphism of cranial morphology in sea snakes.

My experiences with field ecology in Detroit and snake evolution in Ann Arbor led me to work on snake ecology with Dr. Emily Taylor and joined PERL. For my Master’s thesis, I will be using ProjectRattleCam footage to study different social behaviors that are documented on screen. I will use social network analysis for various identifiable behaviors to test for differences in behavior-specific variation in social network structure which would help us better understand the meanings and value of some of these social behaviors. Outside of science, I enjoy art, hiking, baking, playing board games, watching movies, and spending time with my pet turtle, Rhaegal.