El CERZOS continúa con los seminarios del año 2025.
El 16/9 se presenta el investigador francés Eloide Tristan
Charles-Dominique, una colega del French National Centre for
Scientific Research in the AMAP Lab (Montpellier, Francia),
quien colabora con el grupo de la Dra. Ana Elena de Villalobos.
Investigador: Tristan Charles-Dominique
Institución: AMAP Lab, Montpellier (Francia)
Título: Mammals and spiny trees: autopsy of a love-hate
relationship (presentación en inglés)
Fecha: martes 16 de septiembre
Hora: 10 hs.
Modalidad híbrida:
Lugar: Aula Ludwick, CERZOS (Camino La Carrindanga Km 7, E1)
Link Zoom: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84999310011?pwd=mIRZLfWsSocFKDrg41lvKluaSqzgQ9.1
Biografía:
Tristan Charles-Dominique es miembro del Centro Nacional Francés
de Investigación Científica en el Laboratorio AMAP (Montpellier,
Francia). Sus intereses de investigación se centran en la
arquitectura, la ecología y la evolución de las plantas. En
concreto, estudia los mecanismos que explican la estabilidad del
bioma, incluyendo las interacciones entre plantas y herbívoros, y
la retroalimentación entre fuego y vegetación.
Resumen de la presentación:
Poisoning or blinding you in an eye with a thorn: that is how a
tree would treat you if you were a mammalian herbivore in a
savanna. From the plants' perspective these two strategies, i.e.
altering the quality or limiting the quantity of food available,
are necessary for limiting the negative impact of mammals. We
investigated the efficacy of chemical and structural defenses for
deterring herbivores of 63 trees species from Hluhluwe-iMfolozi
game reserve with a team of specialists in plant architecture,
plant chemistry, plant ecology, animal ecology and bioinformatics,
nine volunteers and twenty brave goats (all still alive and well
at the end of the experiment). The first part of the talk will
focus on structural defenses and present results from field
observations, controlled experiments and a new realistic 3D-model
for describing plant-herbivore interactions. While structural
defenses enhance the performance of tree species when herbivores
are present, they also incur costs decreasing their performance
when herbivores are absent. Herbivores then can be considered as
an enemy that trees cannot afford to lose. In a second part, I
will discuss how trees use combinations of mechanisms for both
attracting and repelling mammals explaining the stability of
herbivore-maintained ecosystems. Finally, I will show how this
ecological information can be summarized using a trait approach
and can be used to draw hypotheses about macroevolution at a
larger scale. I will illustrate this point by showing how the use
of dated phylogenies helped understanding the emergence of
herbivore-dominated savannas in Africa and introduce some recent
development about the emergence of Asian open systems.