Bruno A. Souza de Medeiros
Postdoctoral Fellow in OEB, 2018-2019; Graduate Student through 2018
Biography below is based on graduate studies:
I am generally interested in understanding the origins of the spectacular insect diversity. For my thesis work, I am studying a little-known but very promising system of insect herbivores and their host plants: palms and their flower visitors. Palms in the genus Syagrus and related genera are very diverse in South America, and their most frequent flower visitors are several genera of specialized weevils (beetles in the family Curculionidae) and a few species of generalist bees. These weevils have similar life histories and geographical ranges, but differ in the flower resources that they consume and their importance in pollination. This provides a unique system to test how different kinds of insect-host interaction promote diversification, controlling for geography and plant associations. My work involves a significant amount of field collecting and natural history observations in South America, in addition to taxonomy, phylogenetic and phylogeographic analyses.