Post-Doctorante
Campus du CNRS
1919, route de Mende
34293 Montpellier cedex 5

tél : 04 67 61 33 11

monica.arias[at]cefe.cnrs.fr / moarias[at]gmail.com

Personal website

https://monicaarias.weebly.com/

Keywords

Evolutionary ecology, predator-prey interactions, toxicity, visual signals, entomology, citizen science

Research profile

I am an evolutionary ecologist interested in elucidating how ecological interactions promote the evolution of biodiversity, mostly in insects in tropical ecosystems.

My research seeks to understand how trophic interactions influence the evolution of a diversity of prey defences, especially aposematism (conspicuous visual signals associated with toxins), transparency and camouflage, most often in Lepidoptera but also in frogs from South and Central American forests.

More recently, I have been dedicating increasing efforts to develop an integrative and collaborative project to study the ecology and evolution of a group of tropical toxic moths and to pinpoint ecological factors influencing the societal and human health problems caused by these species across South and Central America.