François-Xavier Dechaume-Moncharmont

• PhD
• Professor at Claude Bernard University Lyon 1

Studies on mate choice mainly focus on the evolution of signals that would maximize the probability of finding a good-quality partner. Most models of sexual selection rely on the implicit assumption that individuals can freely compare and spot the best mates in a heterogeneous population. Comparatively few studies have investigated the consequences...

Behavioral similarity between partners is likely to promote within-pair compatibility and to result in better reproductive success. Therefore, individuals are expected to choose a partner that is alike in behavioral type. However, mate searching is very costly and does not guarantee finding a matching partner. If mismatched individuals pair, they m...

Interindividual behavioural differences, consistent over time and across situations, are frequently related to differences in reproductive success, susceptibility to disease and competitive ability. The behavioural phenotype of a conspecific is likely to affect the outcome of a social interaction, so an individual must be able to accurately assess...

In recent years, considerable research interest in behavioral ecology has focused on characterizing and understanding individual differences in behavior that are consistent over time and across contexts, termed animal " personalities, " and correlations between various behaviors across contexts, termed behavioral syndromes. Although there is some e...

Abstract Body surface heat dissipation through of mammals becomes more important as body mass decreases. Thermoregulation is a major challenge for very small species such as the African pigmy mice Mus mattheyi and Mus minutoides that are among the smallest mammals found on our planet and exhibit physiological differences. M. minutoides has one of...

The ecological impact of invasive species is likely to be modulated by human-induced alterations in habitats, which represents another driver of biodiversity loss. We tested the effect of soundscape degradation on predation by the round goby Neogobius melanostomus, one of Europe’s “worst invasive species”. For this, we compared the relationship bet...

The ecological impact of invasive species is likely to be modulated by human-induced alterations in habitats, which represents another driver of biodiversity loss. We tested the effect of soundscape degradation on predation by the round goby Neogobius melanostomus, one of Europe’s “worst invasive species”. For this, we compared the relationship bet...

We used a large dataset of greater flamingo chicks banded and measured at Camargue, France, to verify the applicability of discriminant function analysis to sex this species. Males and females sexed genetically differed significantly in all of the morphological characters measured (body mass, tarsus and wing length), with males being significantly...

The evolution of choosiness has a strong effect on sexual selection, as it promotes variance in mating success among individuals. The context in which choosiness is expressed, and therefore the associated gain and cost, is highly variable. An overlooked mechanism by current models is the rapid fluctuations in the availability and quality of partner...

Reproductive senescence is the decrease of reproductive performance with increasing age and can potentially include trans‐generational effects as the offspring produced by old parents might have a lower fitness than those produced by young parents. This negative effect may be caused either by the age of the father, mother, or the interaction betwee...

Several parasite species have the ability to modify their host's phenotype to their own advantage thereby increasing the probability of transmission from one host to another. This phenomenon of host manipulation is interpreted as the expression of a parasite extended phenotype. Manipulative parasites generally affect multiple phenotypic traits in t...

Senescence, the decline of physiological parameters with increasing age, is a quasi-ubiquitous phenomenon in the living world. The observed patterns of senescence, however, can markedly differ across species and populations, between sexes, and even among individuals. To identify the drivers of this variation in senescence, experimental approaches a...

In humans, affective states are a key component in pair-bonding, particularly in the early stage of a relationship. Pairing with a high-quality partner elicits positive affective states which, in turn, validate and reinforce the mate choice. Affective states thus strongly affect pair stability and future reproductive success. We propose generalizin...

Over time, damages accumulate in the cells leading to the process of cell senescence. Many cellular modifications can then attest to this process and are called senescence biomarkers. Senescence biomarkers are highly studied in humans and are particularly useful for understanding the processes involved in age-related diseases. However, while studie...

The prediction of pest regulation by multi-predator communities often remains challenging because of variable and opposite effects of niche complementarity and predator interference. Carabid communities are regulating weeds in arable fields and include a mix of species ranging from granivores to predators that are obligate omnivores. It is not clea...

Most living organisms display a decline in physiological performances when ageing, a process called senescence that is most often associated with increased mortality risk. Previous researches have shown that both the timing and the intensity of senescence vary a lot within and among species, but the role of environmental factors in this variation i...

A recommendation of : Calcagno V, Hamelin F, Mailleret L, and Grognard F. How optimal foragers should respond to habitat changes? On the consequences of habitat conversion. bioRxiv 273557 (2018), ver. 4 peer-reviewed and recommended PCI Ecology.

The effects of parasites on the reproduction of their hosts are widespread, but studies investigating the effect of female parasitic status on sperm allocation in males, a form of postcopulatory mate choice, remain scarce. Because males are often sperm limited, strategic sperm investment, in which females of low reproductive value receive fewer spe...

Animals foraging in the wild have to balance speed of decision making and accuracy of assessment of a food item’s quality. If resource quality is important for maximizing fitness, then the duration of decision making may be in conflict with other crucial and time consuming tasks, such as anti-predator behaviours or competition monitoring. Individua...

Supporting dataset. All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and in the supplementary materials. (ZIP)

Mean number (bootstrapped +/- 95%CI) of seeds eaten per individuals after one hour of test in each treatment separated by sex. Different letters correspond to statistically significant difference between treatments (post-hoc pairwise comparison with Tukey adjustment for multiple comparisons). The sample sizes are shown above the x-axis. (PDF)

Kaplan-Meier plot for the latency to first movement as a function of the treatments. Each curve represents, for a given treatment group, the proportion of individuals with no movement as a function of the time since the start of the experiment: control (continuous line, n = 70), intraspecific competition (grey line, n = 71), interspecific competiti...

Mean duration (bootstrapped +/- 95%CI) of handling time in each treatment. Different letters correspond to statistically significant difference between treatments (post-hoc pairwise comparison with Tukey adjustment for multiple comparisons). The sample sizes are shown above the x-axis. (PDF)

Precopulatory mate guarding (PCMG) is frequently presented as a classic case of sexual conflict between partners. For instance, long-lasting PCMG is regarded as an adaptive male strategy to secure a female in a context of strong intrasexual competition, while females guarded for a long time are assumed to bear many costs. This assumption has been d...

In a previous article, we advocated against using the sum of Akaike weights (SW) as a metric to distinguish between genuine and spurious variables in Information Theoretic (IT) statistical analyses. A recent article (Giam & Olden, Methods in Ecology and Evolution , 2016, 7, 388) criticises our finding and instead argues in favour of SW. It points o...

1. The pace-of-life syndrome (POLS) hypothesis is an extended concept of the life history theory that includes behavioural traits. The studies challenging the POLS hypothesis often focus on the relationships between a single personality trait and a physiological and/or life history traits. While pathogens represent a major selective pressure, few s...

In monogamous species that provide biparental care, partners with similar behavioural types generally have a better reproductive success than dissimilar ones. The pattern of assortative mating for behavioural type is thus often interpreted as resulting from a mate choice process. However, an alternative process is also possible when the partners be...

Although personality (consistent inter-individual differences in behavioural traits across time and/or contexts) and behavioural syndromes (suites of correlated personality traits) have been widely studied in the last decades, the origin and development of these traits during ontogeny are still underexplored. In this context, species undergoing met...

In order to minimize risks of pathogen transmission with the development of ecotourism in Gabon, a seasonal inventory has been performed in five contrasted biotopes in Ivindo (INP) and Moukalaba-Doudou (MDNP) National Parks. A total of 10,033 hematophagous flies were captured. The Glossinidae, with six different species identified, was the most abu...

Size-assortative pairing is one of the most common pairing patterns observed in nature and it probably occurs in many taxa with cryptic diversity. Observed patterns of size-assortative pairing in natural populations may thus be influenced by the co-occurrence of noninterbreeding cryptic groups of individuals living in sympatry. To quantify this pot...

Paired individuals are expected to leave their current partner for newly encountered ones of higher quality. In such cases, animals should therefore be able to compare the quality of their current partner to the quality of a new prospective mate next to the couple. We tested this prediction in Gammarus pulex, an amphipod species where paired males...

Information‐theory procedures are powerful tools for multimodel inference and are now standard methods in ecology. When performing model averaging on a given set of models, the importance of a predictor variable is commonly estimated by summing the weights of models where the variable appears, the so‐called sum of weights (SW). However, SWs have re...

The relative influence of genetic and phenotypic quality on pairing status and mating patterns in socially mo-nogamous species remains poorly documented. We studied social status and pairing patterns in relation to genetic simi-larity and multilocus heterozygosity (MLH) estimates from 11 microsatellite markers, and both tarsus length and wing chord...

One of the most important decisions that an animal has to make in its life is choosing a mate. Although most studies in sexual selection assume that mate choice is rational, this assumption has not been tested seriously. A crucial component of rationality is that animals exhibit transitive choices: if an individual prefers option A over B, and B ov...

The study of size-assortative mating, or homogamy, is of great importance in speciation and sexual selection. However, the proximate mechanisms that lead to such patterns are poorly understood. Homogamy is often thought to come from a directional preference for larger mates. However, many constraints affect mating preferences and understanding the...

Understanding how fitness is related to genetic variation is of crucial importance in both evolutionary ecology and conservation biology. We report a study of heterozygosity-fitness correlations in a wild, noninbred population of Zenaida Doves, Zenaida aurita, based on a sample comprising 489 individuals (382 adults and 107 juveniles) typed at 13 m...

Although size-assortative mating in convict cichlids, Amatitliana nigrofasciata, is supposed to result from mutual mating preference for larger individuals, female choice in relation to male size remains ambiguous. We revisited the evidence for directional preference for larger males in female convict cichlids using a classical two-way choice appar...

Although increasing attention is given to both the causes and consequences of variation in animal personality, the measurement of personality in captive or free-ranging individuals remains an issue. In particular, one important question concerns whether personality should be established from the existence of complex behavioral syndromes (a suite of...

Discriminant function analysis (DFA) based on morphological measurements is a quick, inexpensive, and efficient method for sex determination in field studies on cryptically monomorphic bird species. However, behind the apparent standardization and relative simplicity of DFA lie subtle differences and pitfalls that have been neglected in some studie...

The term “resource polymorphism” refers to the existence of alternative phenotypes in relation to resource use, as a result of disruptive selection. Evidence for resource polymorphism is widespread in fish but remains scarce in birds. Although Zenaida Doves (Zenaida aurita) usually defend year-round territories, doves on Barbados can also be observ...

Precopulatory mate guarding (PCMG) is generally assumed to be costly for both sexes. However, males may gain by displaying long-lasting mate guarding under strong male-male competition. Surprisingly, the potential for females to benefit from being held by males has been largely overlooked in previous studies. In Gammarus pulex, an amphipod crustace...

Many trophically transmitted parasites manipulate their intermediate host phenotype, resulting in higher transmission to the final host. However, it is not known if manipulation is a fixed adaptation of the parasite or a dynamic process upon which selection still acts. In particular, local adaptation has never been tested in manipulating parasites....

Compromises between speed and accuracy are seemingly inevitable in decision-making when accuracy depends on time-consuming information gathering. In collective decision-making, such compromises are especially likely because information is shared to determine corporate policy. This political process will also take time. Speed-accuracy trade-offs occ...

We consider an agent that must choose repeatedly among several actions. Each action has a certain probability of giving the agent an energy reward, and costs may be associated with switching between actions. The agent does not know which action has the highest reward probability, and the probabilities change randomly over time. We study two learnin...

To perform tasks, organisms often use multiple procedures. Explaining the breadth of such behavioural repertoires is not always straightforward. During house hunting, colonies of Temnothorax albipennis ants use a range of behaviours to organise their emigrations. In particular, the ants use tandem running to recruit naïve ants to potential nest sit...

Information about food sources can be crucial to the success of a foraging animal. We predict that this will influence foraging decisions by group-living foragers, which may sacrifice short-term foraging efficiency to collect information more frequently. This result emerges from a model of a central-place forager that can potentially receive inform...

The workers’ sting extension in response to noxious stimulations is a common test used to study physiological modulations of behaviour in the honey bee. In this study, we investigated the variation of the sting extension response between honey bee workers from different patrilines in a colony with a naturally mated queen. We found that the sting ex...

Many animals nest or roost colonially. At the start of a potential foraging period, they may set out independently or await information from returning foragers. When should such individuals act independently and when should they wait for information? In a social insect colony, for example, information transfer may greatly increase a recruit's proba...

In fall, Myzus persicae (Sulzer) (Homoptera: Aphididae) may exhibit population resurgence in winter oilseed rape in France. This resurgence may arise from pyrethroid treatments against Coleoptera (Psylliodes chrysocephala L.) that either kill parasitoids present during treatment or prevent recolonization by off-crop parasitoids. We studied the impa...

Previous laboratory studies reported disruption of the digestive physiology and learning behaviour in individual honeybees treated with Bowman-Birk inhibitor (BBI), a serine proteinase inhibitor expressed in some GM plants. Our objective was to detect behavioural effects of this transgene on honeybees at the colony level, maintained in laboratory c...

Studies concerning long-term survival of honeybees raise the problem of the statistical analysis of mortality data. In the present study, we used a modeling approach of survival data of caged bees under chronic exposure to two pesticides (imidacloprid and deltamethrin). Our model, based on a Cox proportional hazard model, is not restricted to a spe...

Ce travail de thèse a porté sur le comportement de butinage coopératif chez l’abeille. Dans un environnement hétérogène où les ressources alimentaires sont distribuées de manière discrète, la collecte de nectar chez cet insecte social met en jeu non seulement des processus individuels d’orientation et d’apprentissage, mais aussi des processus colle...