Roberto García-Roa, Ethology researcher from the Cavanilles Institute of the Universitat de València has been awarded the ‘overall second runner-up’ in the photography contest of the ‘BMC Ecology’ journal thanks to his photography ‘Connections’. The work shows three living organisms interacting with each other: a crab spider preying on a bee and an opportunistic dipteran taking advantage of the situation and eating it.
Roberto García-Roa is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Ethology Department of the Cavanilles Institute of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology (ICBIBE) of the Universitat de València.
The researcher explains that the journeys in the country also allow him to take some photographs of the natural environment, always in parallel with the research. In particular, this one shows the connection between living organisms. Its title, ‘Connections’, aims to highlight this. ‘The photography shows the dependency between organisms and likewise the importance of preserving ecosystems in a comprehensive way, explains García-Roa.
The researcher and photographer has won several scientific photography awards like the first photography prize in 2015 or the Ecosystems and Communities prize in 2016, both from the British Ecological Society. Besides, one of his photographs was preselected in the Ecology and Environmental Science category of the Royal Society in 2016, and he has also won the monthly competition from the BBC Wildlife Magazine about the offspring in the nature.
His project at the Universitat de València focuses on the study of the sexual conflict (the diverging evolutionary interests between males and females), the aging and the mechanics attached to these events of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Roberto García-Roa also attempts to answer several questions related to macroecological and macroevolutionary issues using other poikilotherms such as reptiles and amphibians.
Roberto García-Roa’s web:
http://garcia-roa-ecoevo.weebly.com/
BMC Ecology journal’s web:
https://bmcecol.biomedcentral.com/imagecomp2017-page
Article:
https://bmcecol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12898-017-0138-8
Last update: 11 de september de 2017 10:10.
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