Seminaria

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to the upcoming MIZ PAS seminar, which will take place on Thursday, February 19th at 3:00 pm CET. This time our speaker will be Dr. Rowan French from the University of Toronto (Canada), and the Indiana University and the Field Museum (United States).

The title of the presentation is: "Why the long “horns”? Evolution of exaggerated, sexually dimorphic antennae in longhorned beetles (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae)".

Abstract:

Phenotypic divergence between sexes, or sexual dimorphism, represents a key axis of biological variation. Along this axis, some of nature’s most extreme and puzzling forms have evolved (e.g., the antlers of the Irish Elk, the tail of the peacock, or the horns of dung beetles), prompting biologists to ask about the processes that generate and maintain this diversity. However, despite more than a century of work on this topic, many remarkable sexually dimorphic traits remain poorly understood. The antennae of longhorned beetles (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) are an intriguing example. Within Cerambycidae, there is tremendous—and previously unexplained—diversity in both antenna length and antenna length sexual dimorphism across >35,000 species. The focus of this seminar is on explaining how that remarkable diversity arose.

Rowan completed her PhD at the University of Toronto (Canada) and is now an NSERC-funded postdoctoral fellow working jointly at the Indiana University and the Field Museum in the United States. She is broadly interested in the diversity, evolution, and sensory ecology of insects, with emphasis on beetles. Her work spans evolutionary scales—from population-level to macroevolutionary studies—and bridges functional morphology, molecular phylogenetics, population genetics, and chemical ecology.

To join the seminar, please use the link below:

https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/36652503473029?p=h1vsrW0g8C8tlTAOsb

Meeting ID: 366 525 034 730 29
Passcode: Nf3j9R3h

We warmly invite everyone to join and listen to the seminar.
Please spread this announcement in your circles!

MIZ seminar team:
Lech Karpiński, Justyna Kubacka, Marta Maziarz, Magdalena Witek