Raphaël Scherrer

• Master of Science
• PhD Student at University of Groningen

Simulates and computes the (maximum) likelihood of a dynamical model of island biota assembly through speciation, immigration and extinction. See e.g. Valente et al. 2015. Ecology Letters 18: 844-852, <doi:10.1111/ele.12461>. See https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/DAISIE/index.html for details.

Animal signals evolve in an ecological context. Locally adapting animal sexual signals can be especially important for initiating or reinforcing reproductive isolation during the early stages of speciation. Previous studies have demonstrated that dewlap colour in Anolis lizards can be highly variable between populations in relation to both biotic a...

Overview of the results of my PhD about the genomic architecture of speciation so far.

Overview of my PhD results on the genomic architecture of speciation so far.

The protracted speciation model presents a realistic and parsimonious explanation for the observed slowdown in lineage accumulation through time, by accounting for the fact that speciation takes time. A method to compute the likelihood for this model given a phylogeny is available and allows estimation of its parameters (rate of initiation of speci...

Since the theory of punctuated equilibrium was coined by Eldredge and Gould (1972), evidence of cladogenetic change, i.e. rapid phenotypic evolution upon spe-ciation, has accumulated in various traits and taxa. However, the underlying mi-croevolutionary mechanisms driving this macroevolutionary pattern have rarely been tested. Sexual selection is a...

Using X-ray microtomography, we describe the ossification events during the larval development of a non-teleost actinopterygian species: the Cuban gar Atractosteus tristoechus from the order Lepisosteiformes. We provide a detailed developmental series for each anatomical structure, covering a large sequence of mineralization events going from an ea...

More and more studies suggest an important role for adaptation in the pro- cess of speciation. New species can arise as a direct result of the colonization of new ecological niches, a phenomenon called ecological speciation. Here, I looked at adaptive divergence as a response to habitat-driven selection in eleven populations of brown anoles, Anolis...

Population transcriptomics aims at capturing variations in genome-wide expression that may reflect differences in selective pressures applying to the transcriptomes of different populations or sexes, and may therefore underlie ecological adaptation. To better understand the mechanisms of local adaptation, I re-analyzed previously published whole tr...

Theoretical models of macroevolution have been used to test for candidate evolutionary processes that may have produced to the set of highly imbalanced estimated phylogenies in the literature. The Protracted Birth Death model of speciation (PBD; Etienne & Rosindell 2012) implements the fundamental assumption that speciation takes time and is not in...

In this thesis I conducted a CT-scan survey of different stages of development in larvae of the Cuban gar, Atractosteus tristoechus, in order to better understand the sequence of ossification events throughout the skeleton of that fish. In addition, I performed Alcian blue and Alizarin red staining to see, at the level of single tissues and across...