Research

Since my undergrad, when I started to focus on sexual selection and parental care, I have been reading several papers authored by Suzanne Alonzo and I realized that, many of my ideas for future studies, she already did. So, I think: "This means an interest match, right!?!". Now, I am amazed about the opportunity of being part of her lab in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCSC.

During my undergrad research and master's degree, I was part of Glauco Machado's Lab in Universidade de São Paulo (USP), Brazil. I started attending the lab meetings because of my interest in animal behavior and I became passionate by arthropods, specially harvestment (Arachnida, Ordem Opiliones, common called daddy longlegs).

I started studying a harvestman species with maternal care but in which territorial males, sometimes, can take care of the offspring. In this case, I was trying to understand what factors make some males more prone to care (check my publication here). After this, I become more interested in paternal care and I studied a species of daddy longlegs with exclusive paternal care. In this study, I was trying to understand how females choose the best daddy and my bet was that they were paying attention to male's body condition.

In my master's degree, still under Glauco supervision, I decided to go deeper in sexual selection and parental theory. I was interested in understanding how the limitation of reproductive sites (such as nests, burrows, crevices) affects the competition between males, the intensity of sexual selection and the cost of taking care of the offspring. Since I was interested in understand general trends and in many different species, I answered my question with a meta-analytic approach.