Speciation

Speciation lies at the heart of evolutionary questions. We may argue that it is the “original” question of evolution, and that even in 2024 we cannot really answer to a very simple question: “how many species there are on Earth?” The question becomes even more complicated if we add “and how they formed”?
This is the center of speciation research.

In february 2024 I moved to Paris to join Violaine Llaurens’ group, and work on the speciation genomics in Morpho, a beautiful genus of Amazonian butterflies. In particular, I am concentrating on two close species, M. achilles and M. helenor, that overlap in a large part of their distrbution. They differ for a series of ecological characters, like flight time and microhabitat, but their evolutionary history is poorly known. Since they live in simpatry, and share many common features, the main question is how they happened to be two different species. To answer to this questiuon, I am combining phylogenetic methods with demographical modeling and population genetics.