Research
The diversity among individuals within an animal population is the material on which natural selection acts, leading to evolution. This diversity is therefore extremely important for the persistence of a population subjected to rapid changes in its environment. However, by favouring certain characteristics within a population over others, natural selection should reduce the diversity within the population. This creates a paradox: a diverse population responds well to selection, but selection should reduce diversity! So then how is diversity maintained in populations?
In my laboratory, we are interested in the diversity of characteristics that play an important role in the lives of individuals, and in the cause and consequences of this diversity. More specifically, we are looking for the ways that individuals consistently differ in their behaviour, morphology, physiology or life history traits. Individuals vary in these characteristics for genetic reasons, because of parental effects (e.g. amount of parental care), because of their different social experiences, or because they encounter different environments during their lifetime. We work to disentangle these causes and verify the links between these characteristics. We also test evolutionary hypotheses about the factors that maintain diversity.
Our preferred approach is the long term monitoring populations, capturing animals to identify them individually, measuring their traits, monitoring their success in their population (survival, reproduction, etc.), following their descendants, and so on. Check out the blurbs below to see our main research projects and the Lab Members page to see the individual projects of my current lab members.
Blue Tits
Blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) are common birds throughout Europe. My students and I have been working on blue tits since 2011 as part of a larger team that has been following populations of these birds in Corsica since the mid-seventies. Our work focuses mainly on testing predictions from the Pace of Life hypothesis, looking at the relationship between life history traits and behavioural traits such as exploration, aggression and impulsivity. More recently, I joined a project led by Anne Charmantier on the effects of urbanization on populations of great tits in the greater Montpellier region.
Chipmunks
Our team has worked on eastern chipmunks (Tamias striatus) in southern Quebec for more than fifteen years. Chipmunks are particularly interesting because they rely heavily on the seeds of American beech trees (Fagus grandifolia) and red maples (Acer rubrum) for their winter survival and reproduction. These trees produce seeds in coordinated masting events, whereby they flood the forest with seeds one year and then produce no (beech trees) or very few (red maple) seeds the following year. This presents particular challenges for chipmunks, and we have found that this seed production cycle has many consequences for chipmunk demography and life history (population density and age structure, age at first reproduction, senescence and longevity), behaviour, individual specialization of ecological niches, activity rhythms, and parasitism.
Island Syndrome
From 2013 to 2016, we tested the island syndrome hypothesis using several populations of rodents living on island or mainland sites, along the Winnipeg River system (Minaki, northwestern Ontario). This hypothesis predicts that individuals living on islands are larger, more docile, less active, and more thorough in their exploration than their mainland conspecifics, but was developed with very isolated oceanic islands in mind. Our goal was to see if these predictions still held for populations on islands where movement between populations are rare but still possible. We also examined how behaviour affected metapopulation structure by influencing the probability of dispersal and the relationship between spatial variation in rodent gut microbiota and the genetic structure of the rodent metapopulation
SQuID
I’m also involved in an international research project that brings together ecologists interested in better understanding the behaviour of mixed-effects models widely used in ecology to estimate the components of variation and covariation between traits at different levels. We produce new research projects based on statistical simulations and build a teaching program in the form of workshops given to students from all over the world.
