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.