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Although covering only ~0.2% of the ocean’s surface, coral reefs harbour ~25% of ocean biodiversity and provide food to nearly a billion people. Ecological services from coral reefs are essential through fisheries, tourism, coastal protection and are estimated at about 30 billions USD per year. But

Hermaphroditic organisms have served as key models to study the evolution of sex allocation. Despite extensive past research, the genetic and developmental mechanisms by which hermaphrodite sex allocation can evolve remain largely unknown. Specifically, the genetics of sex allocation in hermaphrodit

Learning is indisputably one of the key innovations in the history of life. Using information about past experiences is critical for optimal decision-making in a fluctuating environment. While the evolutionary benefits of learning are clear, very little is known about its origins. We usually think o

Mechanically challenging foods are hypothesized to play a major role in dental adaptation. Generally speaking, these foods are broken into two categories: preferred and fallback foods (FBFs). Preferred foods are those consumed when all food resources are available, while fallback foods are those are

The though of coral reefs conjures up visions of a wide variety of colourful organisms living in clear, warm and shallow waters; but this is only the « tip of an iceberg », mainly from the surface to 30m depth. Compared to shallow reefs, what is below 30m, the so-called Mesophotic Coral Ecosystems (

Studying adaptation to seasonal cycles may generate important insights on the resilience of species to climate change, which disrupts environmental seasonality. However, our understanding of the evolution of reproductive seasonality is limited, and contrasts with our detailed knowledge of its physio

Global patterns of biodiversity are driven by a number of processes that can be analyzed by studying the turnover in species composition across sampled location (i.e. beta diversity). In theory, there are eight possible combinations of high versus low taxonomic ß-diversity, phylogenetic ß-diversity

The main objective of the CoGeDiv project is to address the unknown role of demographic factors in speciation using a multispecies comparative genomic framework. Major biogeographic suture zones offer ideal study systems to implement such a comparative approach. They concentrate across a wide var

Understanding how species adapted to their environment has been one of the most intensively studied fields in evolutionary biology. The most spectacular shifts in morphology and ecology seem to be the result of historical events, such as mass extinctions or island formation. Such events provide new

The functional significance and the physiological mechanisms of sleep remain unsolved. A largely untested assumption is that sleep evolved to sustain immune defences and protect against diseases. The relationship between sleep and the immune system is of prime scientific and medical interests becaus

The illegal wildlife trade has become a global threat to tropical biodiversity and as such, to the millions of people who depend on it. Recently, the scale of wildlife trade has moved from local to global notably through the growing demand from local urban centers and Chinese Traditional Medicine (C

Understanding the ability of plants to adapt to new, potentially harmful, environments is important for monitoring and managing wild and cultivated biodiversity in a changing world. Local adaptation is a pivotal mechanism to explain the maintenance of genetic diversity in natural populations. In the

Modern evolutionary theory developed with the main objective to explain and predict changes in populations from one generation to the next, and how species evolve. Largely independently, paleontologists have accrued a body of knowledge informed by patterns of organismal diversity in deep time, but w

The oceans are strongly affected by global change, which is causing an increase in seawater temperature but also of the surface of areas depleted in iron, an element which already limits the growth of phytoplankton in about 35% of the world ocean. This raises the question of the ability of phytoplan

Aquatic microalgae contribute about a half of global primary production, with picoeukaryotes contributing the greatest fraction (49-69%). The diversity of unicellular eukaryotes is currently a subject of intense investigations, but the class Mamiellophyceae (genera Micromonas, Bathycoccus, Ostreococ

It is now recognised that DNA can move across species barriers, not only in bacteria and archaea, where this has been long-recognised, but also among eukaryotes, including metazoans. In the latter however, Horizontal Transfers (HTs) are only documented from a few case studies, providing us with a hi

The observation that most eukaryotic species are sexual and that asexual species are rare and recent remains one of the greatest puzzles of contemporary evolutionary biology. This puzzle is a theoretical one because sex involves very strong costs relative to asexual reproduction (e.g., the famous tw

Humans have colonized diverse environments so that specific genes, providing adaptation to each environment, are highly likely to have locally evolved (such as adaptation to high-altitude hypoxia). These genes provide adaptation to a local, or specific, environment through a permanent physiological

Hydrothermal vents are ephemeral habitats inhabited by a highly specialized fauna. If connectivity between vent sites is relatively well understood along continuous oceanic ridges, it is a lot less clear for back-arc basins of the western Pacific, despite the increasing threat of deep-sea mining in

The secular changes in environmental temperatures and water availability driven by climate change affect the physiological performances of ectothermic animals and push some of their populations on a fast lane to extinction. The sensitivity, resilience and adaptive potential to climate change of ecto

The tremendous variability of behaviors observed between individuals, and across populations and species, makes studying the molecular basis of behavioral traits particularly challenging. Little is known on how genes contribute to shape behaviors. Recent progress in genomics represents a fantastic o