Anne-Marie Labouche

My research interests focus on plant-insect interactions and floral trait evolution.

During my PhD, I worked on the interaction between Silene latifolia (Caryophylaceae) and its pollinator-seed predator, the moth Hadena bicruris. In this system, the adult moths act as pollinators but also lay their eggs on the female flowers that they pollinate, and the emerging larvae feed on the developing seeds. Thus, the moth provides the plants with both the benefit of pollination and the costs of seed/fruit predation. The general problematic of my PhD work felt in the theoretical context of determining the traits that limit costs and overexploitation in interspecific interaction, hence favouring mutualism. The results obtained from these experiments were of particular interest for the problematic of mutualism, as I found several traits that are rare or absent in the literature on other systems (e.g. pollination by male moths and the effect of plant traits on reducing the success of fruit attack).

I am currently studying the evolution of floral traits associated to pollen movement (pollinator attraction, inflorescence architecture, resource allocated to male and female functions in hermaphrodite plants), using Silene latifolia and Mercurialis annua.

Born September 10th 1979 in Toulouse, France

Oct. 2011-
First assistant at the Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Lausanne. Advisor: Prof. John Pannell

June – Sept. 2011
Scientific collaborator, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland

2006-2011
PhD, Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
"Coupled reproductive ecologies in a plant-pollinator-seed predator system"
Advisor: Prof. Giorgina Bernasconi (co-director), Prof. Ian Sanders (director)
Funding: Fellowship of the Faculty of Biology and Medicine, UNIL

2005-2006
MsC Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolution, University Paul Sabatier Toulouse 3, France
"Phenotypic differentiation between related species in genus Zosterops (Passerine birds) from Indian Ocean"
Advisor: Prof. Christophe Thébaud, EDB Laboratory, University of Toulouse