Insect Communities

Yesterday, Vincent Maicher has successfuly defended his doctoral thesis entitled “Biodiversity patterns of butterflies and moths on Mount Cameroon”. Vincent spent the last five years by studying biodiversity of Cameroonian moths and butterflies from various points of view. It comprised…

Biodiversity of Mount Cameroon is still rather poorly known. We know pretty well as we are constantly meeting unknown species of butterflies and moths. In such cases, we are doing our best to change it and to scientifically describe such…

In the last week, Rob has participated on organisation of the German-Czech Summer School, together with Tiffany Knight and Demetra Rakosy from the Helmhotz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig, and with Jana Jersáková from the University of South Bohemia, České…

Last week, Lucas Brisson has defended at the University of Poitiers his ‘major master project’ (alternative of our MSc thesis) which was fully done during his Erasmus practical traineeship in our group. Lucas spent with us the last six months during which…

Rob has co-authored a study of phylogeny and biogeography of Leptotes butterflies which has recently been published in the respected entomological journal Systematic Entomology. Our analyses, also based on the butterflies collected in Cameroon, tracked the origin and biogeographic history…

Today, Dominik Anýž has defended his Bachelor thesis entitled “Importance of butterflies for pollination of flowering plants”. He reviewed available information on floral traits important for butterfly visitors and discussed it in relation to the psychophilous pollination syndrome. Consequently, he…

Last year, Jana Jersáková and Robert wrote a popularising paper on the current views on plant-pollinator interactions in Živa, the popularising journal of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Recently, this paper was awarded as the best popularising paper in 2018…

Few weeks ago, Rob attended the conference Unifying Tropical Ecology: Strengthening collaborative science organised as the joint meeting of BES and gtö. Firstly, he presented our results on specialisation of pollination systems in higher elevations of Mount Cameroon. Two days…

Last week, we have started with transplants of freshwater organisms between polluted and unpolluted industrial waters. It is an important part of our joint project with David Boukal’s group which aims to reveal how industrial pollution changes the structure of…

Many group members spent the past weeks in the field on the slopes of the Krkonoše Mts. in northern Czech Republic. We were collecting data, mainly focusing on recording floral visitors of flowering plants in semi-natural forests along their altitudinal…