We (read: allround-talented PhD student Gabriel Munar Delgado) program transponder-operated automatic feeders to provide access to individual sparrows only in specific parts of the study area. Does having access to a novel resource change where sparrows breed, and with whom they end up breeding? Basically, we test if performance-dependent habitat choice by individuals can cause…

Many studies stop following the fate of young individuals once they leave the nest, and only restart once they return to breed as adults. As part of the PhD project of Paula Hidalgo Rodriguez, and in collaboration with Carlos Camacho and other colleagues, we try to see what’s inside the black box of juvenile survival…

In this Excellence-project funded by the Spanish Ministry for Science, Juan Ramón Peralta Rincón evaluated the varied impacts that Matching Habitat Choice may have on individuals and populations. For this we used different lines of genetically modified Fruit flies. When these special flies are exposed to a pulse of light of a specific colour, a subset of…

Is there an alternative route towards adaptation besides natural selection? An experimental test This project (funded by an Explora-grant and an Excellence-grant from the Spanish Ministry for Science) with Zebra finches shares the theoretical foundation with the project with grasshoppers, and aimed to provide a proof-of-principle that Matching Habitat Choice can spatially subdivide and diverge a group of…

Neglected mechanisms of adaptation to a changing world: pre-establishment selection on biological invaders It is silently assumed that invasive propagules that are introduced into a novel distribution range are a random subset of the native population of origin, basically because there is virtually no data on what happens when propagules are taken up and transported across the…

Neglected mechanisms of adaptation to a changing world: Matching Habitat Choice Individuals exert Matching Habitat Choice if they somehow evaluate their ecological performance in one or more local habitats, and based on this information choose to stay or not in a given habitat. If individuals have different phenotypes, then the preferred habitat may vary between individuals as…