As part of a partnership with the City of Paris, several members of the laboratory (Basile Finand, Céline Bocquet, Pierre Federici, Thibaud Monnin et Nicolas Loeuille (“EERI” Team of “DCFE” Department and “ESEAE” Team of “EcoEvo” Department) sample the soil fauna and in particular the ants in the Parisian green spaces. To popularize and explain this study to the greatest number of people and especially to the Parisians who would be likely to cross them in the green spaces, the City of Paris made a live on Instagram on its page Paris Nature and diffused on Youtube.

On Wednesday, June 23rd, Basile Finand made a live on the social networks of the City of Paris to popularize a part of his thesis on dispersal evolution due to environmental variability. The objective of this part is to study the adaptation of ants to urbanization and more precisely the impact of habitat fragmentation on the dispersal of the ant Myrmecina graminicola.

Many environmental changes alter the habitat of each species. Urbanization is one of these key changes and is characterized in particular by the cutting of their habitats into several parts (fragmentation).

The movement of individuals (dispersal) between these habitats, such as parks, is important for population survival but can be a risk because individuals can fall into unsuitable areas such as roads. Ants are interesting organisms to study this adaptation because they show a wide variation in dispersal.

The objective of the study is to understand how this dispersal evolves in an urban context by sampling ants in Parisian green spaces and by comparing the results with ants present in the forests of Ile-de-France sampled last year.