Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: GUSTAVO BRANT DE CARVALHO PATERNO

Uma banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO de DOUTORADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
DISCENTE : GUSTAVO BRANT DE CARVALHO PATERNO
DATA : 08/05/2018
HORA: 13:00
LOCAL: Departamento de Ecologia-CB
TÍTULO:

Sex, herbivores and flower evolution

PALAVRAS-CHAVES:

good genes, parasites, biomass, coevolution, natural enemies, phylogeny, macroevolution.

PÁGINAS: 50
GRANDE ÁREA: Ciências Biológicas
ÁREA: Ecologia
RESUMO:

Parasites represent a strong evolutionary force driving the evolution and maintenance of sex in a different organisms. Species with a higher range of parasites should invest more in outcrossing and  show more developed secondary sexual characters (sosigonic theory). In the last decades, many studies found support for this theory in different groups of animals. Nonetheless, a more general test of this theory to plants still poorly explored. Angiosperms show the most diverse range of reproductive strategies among organisms, thus, representing an interesting model for the study of sex evolution. Sexual reproduction in angiosperms happens in flowers which can be divided into four basic components: androecium (male function); gynoecium (female function); corolla (pollinators attraction) and calyx (ovary defense). Surprisingly, comparative studies evaluating resource partition between these flower components remain overlooked. Therefore, the study of flower allometry in a global scale represent an important gap, offering great potential to unveil new macro-evolutionary patterns. This thesis is organized in three chapters that investigate patterns of sex allocation in angiosperms and the role of herbivores in the evolution of flower sexual strategies. In the first chapter, flower biomass data was collected for four continents (South America, North America, Europe and Oceania) to test the existence of a general allometric pattern in flower sex allocation of angiosperms species. Our findings highlight that resource allocation to flowers follow a general allometric law that is mostly independent of species evolutionary history. The second chapter, we tested the hypothesis that a higher pressure of herbivores (at the evolutionary scale) favors the evolution of reproductive strategies with higher investment in outcrossing and sexual secondary characters. Our results provide strong evidence that the parasite-mediated sex evolution theory also applies to the plant kingdom. In the third chapter, a set of new statistical and graphical methods were developed (R package sensiPhy) to perform sensitivity analyses considering multiple types of uncertainties in phylogenetic comparative methods (phylogenetic, intra-specific and sampling uncertainty).We hope sensiPhy encourages the inclusion of sensitivity analysis as a common practice in comparative biology.

MEMBROS DA BANCA:
Interno - 1837921 - ALEXANDRE FADIGAS DE SOUZA
Presidente - 1678202 - CARLOS ROBERTO SORENSEN DUTRA DA FONSECA
Interno - 1718346 - EDUARDO MARTINS VENTICINQUE