CEFISES Seminar: Caroline Nieberding, « Behavioural Responses of Animals to the ongoing 6th Major Biodiversity Extinction »

Series: Conservation

Speaker: Caroline Nieberding (UCLouvain)

Title: « Behavioural Responses of Animals to the ongoing 6th Major Biodiversity Extinction: do Insects Adapt to Climate Warming and to Habitat Fragmentation? »

Abstract:
The ongoing 6th biodiversity massive extinction crisis has begun and the IPBES Global report (2019) has made it clear that human activities affecting land use are the main cause of this biodiversity crash. Climate warming has detrimental effects as well on species survival. How do animals react to these extremely rapid changes in their habitat ? Over the last decade, it has become clear that most animals learn, including small-brained, short-lived and non-social species. Learning is a behavioural response of animals after experience of their environment. I will summarize the experimental work produced in the lab and in semi-field conditions, where we quantify the behavioural responses of animals to environmental changes, and test whether they can learn to adapt to new environmental conditions. We focus on climate warming and the colonization of new habitats through oviposition site selection in field-caught populations of Belgian butterflies, and in spider mites.