Eve Davidian

French National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS · Institute of Evolutionary Science of Montpellier - ISEM

When and where animals reproduce influences the social, demographic and genetic properties of the groups and populations they live in. We examined the extent to which male spotted hyenas ( Crocuta crocuta ) coordinate their breeding-group choice. We tested whether their propensity to settle in the same group is shaped by passive processes driven by...

In animal societies, control over resources and reproduction is often biased towards one sex. Yet, the ecological and evolutionary underpinnings of male–female power asymmetries remain poorly understood. We outline a comprehensive framework to quantify and predict the dynamics of male–female power relationships within and across mammalian species....

In many animal societies, dominant males have a higher reproductive success than subordinate males. The proximate mechanisms by which social rank influences reproductive success are poorly understood. One prominent hypothesis posits that rank‐related male attributes of attractiveness and fighting ability are the main mediators of reproductive skew....

Identifying how dominance within and between the sexes is established is pivotal to understanding sexual selection and sexual conflict. In many species, members of one sex dominate those of the other in one-on-one interactions. Whether this results from a disparity in intrinsic attributes, such as strength and aggressiveness, or in extrinsic factor...

The ultimate payoff of behaviours depends not only on their direct impact on an individual, but also on the impact on their relatives. Local relatedness—the average relatedness of an individual to their social environment—therefore has profound effects on social and life history evolution. Recent work has begun to show that local relatedness has th...

In conservation, a growing population is often taken as a sign of success. But trends in population size can be misleading. When individuals are long-lived, populations may keep growing---for a time---even as the environment begins to stabilize or deteriorate. Trends in carrying capacity (K) would better reflect the situation that a population find...

The diet of large carnivores is of great interest to conservation managers, as it can reveal the extent of human-carnivore conflict and the impact of carnivores on species of high conservation priority. Metabarcoding of environmental DNA can identify species and is often more reliable in doing so than observational or morphological methods. Metabar...

Anthropogenic activity can have substantial effects on wildlife. These effects may vary according to the characteristics of the activity and the species involved. Although effects on behaviour are well studied, studies of effects on fitness and physiology are scarce, particularly for group‐living species. We exploited a natural experimental setup t...

The causes and consequences of being in a particular dominance position have been illuminated in various animal species, and new methods to assess dominance relationships and to describe the structure of dominance hierarchies have been developed in recent years. Most research has focused on same-sex relationships, however, so that intersexual domin...

The rate of adaptive evolution, the contribution of selection to genetic changes that increase mean fitness, is determined by the additive genetic variance in individual relative fitness. To date, there are few robust estimates of this parameter for natural populations, and it is therefore unclear whether adaptive evolution can play a meaningful ro...

Management strategies to reduce human-carnivore conflict are most effective when accepted by local communities. Previous studies have suggested that the acceptance depends on emotions toward carnivores, the cultural importance of carnivores, and livestock depredation, and that it may vary depending on the types of strategies and carnivores involved...

Chromosomal change is recognized as an important force in speciation-with-gene-flow models. Although Robertsonian (Rb) translocations contribute to hybrid unfitness and modify recombination patterns, they are generally not considered as efficient as inversions in reducing gene flow. The present study analyses two hybridizing chromosomal races of th...

Dispersal is a key driver of ecological and evolutionary processes. Despite substantial efforts to explain the evolution of dispersal, we still do not fully understand why individuals of the same sex of a species vary in their propensity to disperse. The dominant hypothesis emphasizes movements and assumes that leaving home (dispersal) and staying...

Enzyme immunoassays ( EIA s) are widely used to quantify concentrations of hormone metabolites. Modifications in laboratory conditions may affect the accuracy of metabolite concentration measurements and lead to misinterpretations when results of different accuracy are combined for a statistical analysis. This issue is of great relevance to studies...