معرفی
Dr. Leticia Avilés is Professor of Zoology at the University of British Columbia, investigating the evolutionary forces driving social organization and their population-level consequences. Her research employs multilevel selection theory to examine social evolution, metapopulation dynamics, and cooperative systems, with emphasis on spider sociality as model systems.
Key research areas:
- Origins and maintenance of cooperation in social spiders
- Evolution of skewed sex ratios in subdivided populations
- Metapopulation ecology and life history evolution
- Antipredator strategies and extended phenotypes
- Mutualistic interactions across environmental gradients
Her work integrates field experiments across elevational gradients in the Andes, theoretical modeling, and genomic approaches to study convergent social evolution. Recent publications explore kleptoparasite impacts on spider colonies, energetics of group living, neural investment patterns, and mutualism mediation mechanisms. Experimental manipulations test how environmental factors like precipitation and predation shape social evolution.
