French Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE)
OSTRICH (for Ostrinia-Trichogramma) is a three-year project on the interaction of natural corn-borer populations and their egg parasitois in genus Trichogramma (both wild and released for biocontrol).
Field sampling started last autumn, and we are beginning to wake-up our diapausing populations in the lab for upcoming experiments. To be continued…
I will defend my Habilitation (HDR) thesis, entitled “Adaptive dynamics: from individual behavior to community evolution“, on September 9, in Sophia Antipolis.
Flora Aubree and Samuel Nilusmas, two PhD candidates in the lab, got their first articles accepted at the same time! Flora’s paper on community adaptation and biodiversity-functioning relationships will soon appear in Ecology Letters, and Samuel’s work on the modelling of plant resistance deployment is published in early view in Evolutionary Applications. Good job you two!!
I am opening a PhD position, funded for three years by the INRAE and the University Cote d’Azur (UCA), in collaboration with the Bioline Agrosciences company.
The project (Trichomove) is on the multi-scale study of movement and dispersal in Trichogramma insects, the parasitic microwasps we study and that are used as biocontrol agents to protect crops.
Start Date: October 2020. All details can be found here.
Please contact me if you are interested, and spread the word (words spread harmlessly, unlike other beasts).
Flora has posted her first preprint presenting her results using adaptive dynamics to study how biodiversity-ecosystem functioning should depend on the level of coadaptation of species within ecosystems. Have a look at it here: https://doi.org/10.1101/867820
Earlier this month I’ve organized a one-day conference on the modelling of ecological dynamics, in the gorgeous Grand Chateau at Valrose campus in Nice (MODECO day). With more than 10 speakers, two guests from Montpellier and Nantes, over 60 participants, this has been a very interesting and thought-provoking day. Thanks to all participants, coorganizers and to UCA/MODELIFE for sponsoring. Looking forward to a second edition.
My research institute is organizing the 41th edition of the french congress on Entomophagous insects, on May 27-29, in the great location of Antibes Juan-les-Pins. I’ll give a talk on Wednesday, on the movement of Trichogramma waps.
All details here.
March 3-8. I’ll be there and present some recent results on Trichogramma spatial propagation. https://www.grc.org/movement-ecology-of-animals-conference/2019/
After a total of 4 years in the lab, Victor Burte successfully defended his thesis this December, on the movement strategies of Trichogramma parasitoids and the use of high-throughput image analysis techniques. Congratulations!
A long lasting modeling work (begun as a Master student actually, though considerably modified since then) has just been published as an article in Nature Communications.
We study the impact of diversity on the possibility of evolutionary diversification (adaptive radiation) under different scenarios of ecological interactions. We find that diversification, if impossible starting at low diversity levels, can become quite possible if more diversity is brought into the system. This causes what is reminiscent of an Allee-effect, but for the dynamics of diversity.
See also http://www.cnrs.fr/inee/communication/breves/b287.html
Vincent Calcagno 