Marie-Claire Chelini

My research focuses on understanding how the integration of multiple selecting agents can lead to the evolution of sexually dimorphic traits, as well as what is the influence of environmental factors, such as diet and temperature, on the magnitude and direction of differences between male and female phenotypes. Using the crab spider species Mecaphesa celer as a study system, in my PhD I studied how different sources of selection integrate with developmental pathways and metabolic physiology to result in extreme differences in size between the sexes. In a nutshell, I am interested in understanding how and why females of this species grow to be more than twice the size of males, and what is the role of the environment, more specifically diet and temperature, in the degree of size difference between the sexes.