Research :
The core objective of the research team deals
with adaptive responses of the organism to environmental factors, with a
central focus on functional and evolutionary aspects. The conducted
researches, using different models (plants, arthropods, birds, mammals)
are mainly based on experimental and pluridisciplinary approaches,
associating data from behavioural ecology, functional anatomy and
integrative physiology. The common aim is to decrypt among environmental
factors, either abiotic (climate, light, habitat, food resources) or
biotic (interindividual communication, social systems), those
representing the major selective constraints in the expression and
regulation of adaptive responses. In this context, perception of the
environment, that is sensory pathways and signals, represents a key
feature to understand the mechanisms underlying the regulation of
adaptive responses. Among those mechanisms, daily and seasonal rhythms
are of main interest owing to their high adaptive value to recurrent
variation of the environment. Finally, adaptations are the result of
evolutionary processes to face pressure of selection. Therefore, part of
our research aims at bringing pieces of explanation to processes of
phylogeny, and even speciation. These researches are most often
developed in collaboration with other scientific teams and are funded by
several research grants. They rely on the concepts of behavioural
ecology and more generally to the biology of adaptation. They bring new
pieces of thought about the set up of protocols of biodiversity
management, and even provide applications in the field of human health.
