I joined the group in July 2022. During my PhD, I am investigating the role of environmental factors in shaping the variation and plasticity of social organization in ant species.
I have been interested in arthropods for a long time and I took part to research about several taxonomic groups during my academic cursus (coprophagous beetles, aquatic macroinvertebrates, longwing & clearwing butterflies and ants). I am particularly focusing on species distributions, traits diversity and on large scale interactions between species.
During my master’s degree, I worked on heliconiine & ithomiine butterfly mutualistic interactions (Müllerian mimicry) at the American continent scale. I investigated if these interactions can shape both species distributions and climatic niches via convergent evolution for co-mimetic species (species which belong to the same mimicry ring).
For my PhD project, I am interested in the drivers of ant social organization and traits (i.e. number of workers, number of queens or number of worker casts). I will study their diversity, variation and plasticity among ants species in relation with environmental conditions and climatic niches. To achieve that, I will study ant species at several levels:
- Global : I will use macroecological approaches to access social structure diversity at a global scale in order to identify geographic and environmental determinants of social traits globally.
- Community : I will study distributions of several ant species along environmental gradients and I investigate if their social trait variations are related with external conditions and if there is tradeoffs between individual and social functional traits.
- Intraspecific (to be done): I will study ant species which have an important social trait plasticity in order to determine if environmental factors along a gradient are related to such a plasticity
| 2022-present | PhD in Cleo Bertelsmeier’s group, University of Lausanne |
| 2019 – 2021 | MSc Biodiversity Ecology Evolution, Paris-Saclay University • Modelling of the distribution of heliconiine butterflies • Study of mutualistic interactions and their impact on species distributions and climatic niches • Literature review about dynamics of colonization of aquatic macro-invertebrates in lentic habitats |
| 2016 – 2019 | BSc Biodiversity Science, University of Lyon 1 • Volunteering in two projects about crop protection insects & coprophagous beetles |
Contact Eddie
Office 2101
eddie.perochon[@]unil.ch