Promoter: Ioanna Gavriilidi
​​Co-promoters: Lisa Van Linden, Raoul Van Damme
Subject: Island populations, and populations surviving in small numbers within habitat remnants, face a threat of inbreeding depression. Inbreeding, the production of offspring through the mating of individuals that are closely related by common ancestry, leads to increased homozygosity, raises the risk of expressing deleterious alleles and in extreme cases results in reduced biological fitness, lower fertility, high juvenile mortality and physical or cognitive effects. While the impacts of inbreeding on life-history traits and morphology are relatively well-established, its cryptic effects on wildlife cognition remain largely unquantified.
In this project, the student will use a laboratory-bred pedigreed population of Italian wall lizards (Podarcis siculus) to compare the performance of inbred and outbred conspecifics. The focus will be on cognitive performance: do inbreds have reduced learning capacity, memory, spatial cognition, problem solving skills compared to outbred individuals?
Note: the behavioural tests should start in the first half of 2027.
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