First, a clarification: I'm a myrmecophile...

I have a soft spot for ants and so I have used them as the model system to answer my burning research questions. Because of this, I usually get the question: Why ants? For starters ants are ubiquitous, occurring in all terrestrial ecosystems except Antarctica. Many researchers agree that the social structure of ants is one of the key factors that contributes to their ecological success. Their advanced social system grants them many unique ways that enhance their establishment and persistence in multiple environments. Some of these benefits include group protection against predators, organized resource exploitation, aggressive colony defence and buffering against drastic environmental changes. So, ants represent an ideal system to study how their communities change under different environmental conditions. Additionally, ants represent a unique opportunity and challenge to examine the effects of environmental factors on the phenotype of an individual due to their caste differentiation. The vast majority of ant species include morphologically distinct castes: reproductive males and females (queens), and non-reproductive females (workers), with the latter also sometimes having different morphologies. These castes can vary in size and behaviour within the same colony. Finally, given their ubiquity, ants are bound to be involved in many ecosystem processes, so much so that have even been termed "the little things that rule the world".

Scroll down if you want to learn more about my current research questions!

What determines the morphological space occupied by an organism?

While most biologists would agree that speciation is responsible for the generation of biological diversity, what maintains this diversity is still the topic of much debate and a central focus of research in ecology. Evidence suggests that differences in morphological, physiological and behavioural traits are at the root of biodiversity maintenance. Thus, I'm interested in what limits the differences and variations in an organism's traits which are usually expressed in trade-offs. In particular, I'm fascinated by the role that evolution, development and biological interactions play in defining the trait trade-offs of an organism. As part of my PhD thesis, I'm working on a project looking into this with the objective of elucidating more about the mechanisms behind biodiversity maintenance.

How does the functional structure of communities vary across broad environmental gradients?

Many ecologists have turned their attention to species traits in order to search for common principles in the observed species distribution patterns. According to this approach, the processes governing species occurrences can be seen as ‘‘filters’’ that either allow or exclude species with certain traits from a species pool to occur in a locality. Two processes classically considered to be central are: abiotic filtering, that is, the exclusion of species that do not tolerate a particular abiotic stress (such as high temperatures), and biotic filtering or the exclusion of a species by another one through competitive exclusion. The effects of these two processes on trait variation are generally expected to be opposite, with abiotic filters causing more restricted trait ranges among co-occurring species, while competitive exclusion of species with too similar niches results in communities of species with a higher differences of trait values. For example, imagine looking at species across an environmental gradient, we would expect to see the gradient extremes harbouring species with similar trait values that are able to establish and persist under those conditions and in the middle, we see co-occurring species with higher differences of trait values. In one of my PhD thesis chapters, I am evaluating how the trait structure of ant communities varies across a broad gradient of temperature and precipitation.

How does human activity affect the structure of biological communities?

The conversion of natural forests to croplands degrades natural ecosystems and increases the rate of biodiversity loss, increasingly threatening biodiversity worldwide. The increasing demand for food production is causing farmers to transition from traditional, sustainable practices to more intensive ones. This shift causes unfavorable conditions for accompanying biodiversity mainly through the loss of forest cover, especially in tropical regions. Thus, it becomes important to gauge the impacts of human activities on the structure of biological communities. Given that biodiversity is a multidimensional construct, we must assess these impacts across the taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional dimensions. Using a comprehensive approach that evaluates multiple biodiversity dimensions, we are currently evaluating the effects of coffee plantation management intensification on community structure alongside colleagues at Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia.

How do changes in biological communities affect ecosystem processes?

Quantifying and understanding the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem processes is increasingly becoming a top priority. Moreover, this relationship is important to understand because socio-economic development is usually accompanied by the loss of natural habitat and species.

While working with under the supervision of Prof. Paulo S. Oliveira during my MSc, I studied ant-flower and ant-treehopper interactions in the Cerrado. I found that the presence of ant-treehopper mutualisms near flowers can negatively influence the visits of potential pollinators and, in turn, affect fruit and seed production. I argue that the outcome of these interactions depend on several factors including, but not limited to, the identity and density of the species involved. Because of this work, I'm interested in learning more about how different community structures can affect ecosystem processes, with particular attention to tri-trophic interactions within said communities.