Jacqueline Litzgus

Biography

I have had the rare privilege to turn my childhood fascination into a career. I grew up catching snakes, turtles and toads in the forests and creeks near my house. As a professor, I have the opportunity to share my passion for these animals and their conservation with students in the classroom and in the field. I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Guelph. There I met herpetologists Ron Brooks and Jim Bogart, and so began my formal training in herpetology. I did my MSc under Ron’s supervision at Guelph, studying the population ecology of Spotted Turtles at their northern range limit. In the summers, I taught biology to kids at a canoe-tripping camp, and so got to combine my interests in biology, teaching, and the outdoors. Between my MSc and PhD, I worked as a Lab Coordinator in the Cryobiology Lab at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, USA. I worked with Rick Lee and Jon Costanzo, and their graduate and undergraduate students. I learned a whole new set of skills and gained an appreciation for physiological-ecology and the incredible adaptations that herps have for surviving winter. After three years in the Cryo Lab, I decided it was time for me to return to graduate school, to answer the questions about latitudinal variation in turtle life histories that arose during my MSc research. So I left Ohio and moved to South Carolina to study the population ecology of Spotted Turtles at their southern range limit. I worked under the supervision of Tim Mousseau, an ex-pat Canadian, at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. After completion of my PhD, I moved to Long Island, New York to live with my husband, Dr. Thomas Merritt who was doing a post doc at Stony Brook University (he is now a CRC here at Laurentian in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry). While in New York, I worked as an Adjunct Professor at Long Island University and as a research associate at Applied Biomathematics. Then, in spring 2004, I was offered the faculty position here at Laurentian University, and so I moved back home to Ontario after 8 years in the USA. I have been a professor at Laurentian since July 2004.

Research Interest

My research program combines field and lab-based approaches, and basic and applied science. Projects in my lab address questions in the areas of evolutionary ecology and conservation biology of reptiles, including examination of the adaptive significance of life history variation, and the application of these data to mitigation and recovery actions. Recent and current research examined/examines variation in the life history and ecology of federally-listed turtle and snake species, with emphasis on demography, maternal investment, road ecology, spatial ecology and habitat selection. The physiological research examines questions about the adaptive bioenergetic, fitness, and thermoregulatory consequences of certain behaviours, particularly summer and winter dormancy, in reptiles.