A good fellowship application takes time to craft, so if you are thinking of coming to the UK and are interested in climate change effects on insect reproduction - including different life stages, eggs, micropyles, imaging, microscopy, thermal limits, ecological physiology, plants and microclimates and more - now is the time to think about it! There are different schemes to consider, depending on eligibility criteria:
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Time is a tyrant and, as I have write this, my summer Erasmus student, Teun de Jong, has almost finished his internship. I first met Teun in Wageningen, in February 2023, during my visiting fellowship to the lab of Nina Fatouros. Teun was fascinated by my work on thermal fertility sensitivity in the large white butterfly, Pieris brassicae, and the experimental set up that Jamie Smith had worked on during last summer 2022 for his MSc research (as a side note, congratulations to Jamie on securing a PhD at the University of Hull!). Luckily, he secured an Erasmus research internship to come work with me in Lincoln this summer 2023! Teun has worked very hard this summer to replicate Jamie's experiments heating wild pupae of the large white butterfly, and measuring the effects of heat on butterfly reproduction success and fitness. Teun arrived the last week in May 2023, and, in a happy coincidence, I had just received news that I had been funded by the Royal Society for an international exchange with Sylvain Pincebourde. Teun therefore, started trialling different thermal imaging cameras with Sylvain's help. Following this, Teun launched into rearing butterflies and plants, setting up experiments and troubleshooting the butterfly's lack of interest in mating! I have thoroughly enjoyed working with Teun, who is looking for a PhD. I can highly recommend him, he is hard working, dedicated, and I have no doubt he will find a suitable project to pursue and excel in. A couple of weeks back I talked about my new venture as a member of a Special Topics Network on Thermal Fertility Limits. This is a network of researchers interested in delving deeper into the mechanisms behind fertility failure following heat stress. I attended the first of three online meetings of the network and, after so many months at home with little interaction from a research perspective, it was so interesting and refreshing. We discussed a range of ideas around the topic and, as you'd expect, we had more questions than answers. We started off by asking: what do me mean with fertility? Do we intend viable eggs and sperm? Number of hatched young? Clutches of eggs? Then we moved on to thermal stress. Heat stress comes in lots of different forms, which one should we study? Long-term heat stress or short intense bursts? Should we be looking at a constant temperature, steady or sudden increase? If an animal/plant suffers damage, should be looking at irreversible damage or measure time to recovery? Are there sex differences (some initial evidence suggests there are)? Does it matter at what developmental stage heat stress happens? For insects, which undergo metamorphosis, early stages are usually immobile and less likely to be able to buffer damage caused by heat stress. Could this affect the lifespan of the individual post sexual maturity? There seem to be almost endless possibilities for student research! If you are interested please do get in touch to discuss this exciting and timely topic. I will be writing more as the network develops, meanwhile we will stay in touch and meet regularly. At the beginning of this year, I was invited to join a Special Topics Network of colleagues (mainly, but not exclusively, behavioural ecologists) of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology to work on the evolutionary ecology of thermal fertility limits. The network is chaired by Claudia Fricke, Tom Prize, Rhonda Snook and Amanda Bretman, and I was very excited to join this initiative.
I have previously noted that males and females show different sensitivity to temperature stress. This may tell us something about how species will be affected by climate change and how we might buffer or tackle these sensitivities. I am very keen to explore this further. As I mentioned previously, I have been isolating at home for over half a year now, and therefore I was disappointed that I would not be able to join the inaugural meeting of the Special Topics Network set to take place at the end of March 2020 in Germany. However, due to the current lockdown in place in most of Europe and the rest of the world, the inaugural meeting was hosted online. Three separate online sessions were hosted to allow all participants to have a say on how the network should be shaped, and what we would like to achieve, so more to follow soon! |
AuthorGraziella Iossa Archives
August 2023
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