Claire Marie-Soleil Dufour

Harvard University | Harvard · Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology

During the last two decades, genotyping of African rodents has revealed important hidden diversity within morphologically cryptic genera, such as Rhabdomys. Although the distribution of Rhabdomys is known historically, its diversity has been revealed only recently, and information about the distribution range of its constituent taxa is limited. The...

Invasive species are a world‐wide threat to biodiversity. Yet, our understanding of biological invasions remains incomplete, partly due to the difficulty of tracking and studying behavioural interactions in recently created species interactions. We tested whether the interactions between the recently introduced invasive lizard Anolis cristatellus a...

Till 2003 Rhabdomys (the four striped mouse was considered a single species with impressive ecological and behavioral variations. We have compiled information on social behavior/organisation of the african striped mouse (Rhabdomys) from studies published before or not including information on known species diversity within the genus . Whenever poss...

A recent study showed that hurricanes can act as selective agents affecting the phenotype of anole populations subjected to these extreme climatic events. Specifically, Anolis lizards that survived hurricanes were shown to have larger toepads than those that did not. To test whether hurricanes more generally impact populations of Anolis lizards, we...

Nest‐site selection is an important component of species socio‐ecology, being a crucial factor in establishment of group living. Consequently, nest‐site characteristics together with space‐use proxies may reveal the social organization of species, which is critical when direct observation of social interactions is hindered in nature. Importantly, n...

Species invasions may drive native species to extinction. Yet, the role of competition with a closely related native species in the establishment success of an invasive species remains poorly understood. Indeed, opportunities to study native-invasive competition in action are rare, especially at the very first stages of the invasion. We studied the...

Invasive species are a global threat to biodiversity. Cases where the invasion has been tracked since its beginning are rare, however, such that the first interactions between invasive and native species remain poorly understood. Communication behavior is an integral part of species identity and is subject to selection. Consequently, resource use a...

Table S1 and S2. Table S1. Raw data of the proportion of time spent displaying and the proportion of display-time spent dewlapping for tested male Anolis oculatus and A. cristatellus in allopatry and sympatry (Calibishie, Dominica 2016). All displays were categorized as either dewlap or push-up displays; our metric (“proportion_display_time_ spent_...

Species invasions are a global scourge. Nonetheless, they provide the appropriate evolutionary setting to rigorously test the role that interspecific competition plays in species evolution. The process of ecological character displacement, in which species diverge in sympatry to minimize resource use overlap, is one example. Here, we examine whethe...

Abiotic and biotic factors affect life-history traits and lead populations to exhibit different behavioural strategies. Due to the direct link between their behaviour and fitness, parasitoid females have often been used to test the theories explaining these differences. In male parasitoids, however, such investigations are vastly understudied, alth...

This study reports a high rate of ventro–ventral (VV) copulation in 2 species of the African four-striped mouse—Rhabdomys—and explores its causes. VV postures were observed in 67% encounters with mating attempts, in both species and during intra- and interspecific trials, although discrimination between the species occurred (i.e., duration of sexua...

Coexistence often involves niche differentiation either as the result of environmental divergence, or in response to competition. Disentangling the causes of such divergence requires that environmental variation across space is taken into account, which is rarely done in empirical studies. We address the role of environmental variation versus compe...

Optimal foraging models predict how an organism allocates its time and energy while foraging for aggregated resources. These models have been successfully applied to organisms such as predators looking for prey, female parasitoids looking for hosts, or herbivorous searching for food. In this study, information use and patch time allocation were inv...

A female Asobara tabida being glued on a hair during the patch preparation. The female is anesthetised before the procedure, and the hair is unglued from the agar substrate once she awakens. (WMV)