PhD Student - Department of Biology

OPPORTUNITY DETAILS

Total reward

0 $

State University

Ghent University

Area

Western Europe

Host Country

Belgium

Deadline

15 Mar 2021

Study level

Doctoral Degree

Opportunity type

PhD

Specialities

Biology

Opportunity funding

Not funding

Eligible Countries

This opportunity is destined for all countries

Eligible Region

All Regions

Last application date Mar 15, 2021 00:00

Department WE11 - Department of Biology

Contract Limited duration

Degree MSc degree related to the subject area

Occupancy rate 100%

Vacancy type Research staff

Job description

The Department Biology of Ghent University is offering a PhD scholarship (R1-level) in 2021 commencing latest on July 1st.

The PhD student will be hosted at both the EON (Research group Evolution and Optics of Nanostructures) and TEREC (Terrestrial Ecology) research group. Supervision by prof. Dries Bonte (Dries.Bonte@Ugent.be) and dr. Bram Vanthournout (Bram.Vanthournout@Ugent.be). Urbanisation leads to a strong homogenisation of biodiversity, as many species go extinct while few species are able to persist in cities across the world. This persistence is caused by tolerance or adaptations towards stressors like urban heating and altered resources. Orb web spiders are predators that experience strong changes in prey composition but also a performance reduction due to thermal stress. Changes in body colouration are an important adaptation to thermal conditions, but they are constrained by nutritional conditions.

As city life would select for paler colouration, reduced costs of producing pigments may provide an explanation for rescue under poor nutritional conditions in urban environments.

The student will participate in a research project funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) and study the interplay between thermal and nutritional urban selection pressures in the garden spider. This will be achieved by a further development of an ongoing citizen-science project (www.spiderspotter.com), combined with an extended survey of prey availability and nutritional quality in a research platform in Flanders and the quantification of body colouration across urban gradients in Europe. Targeted translocation experiments will subsequently allow understanding of the adaptive value of these phenotypic changes, as well as the potential for genetic evolution.