CNRS-EPHE: CRIOBE
I am a PhD student at the Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris 6) and the `Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes'(EPHE) under the direction of Serge Planes at the CRIOBE lab. My work focus on endemism in French Polynesia. French Polynesia presents a particular interest. It is the only biogeographic region of the Indo-Pacic with three areas of high endemism: the Marquesas archipelago, the Austral archipelago and the Acteon-Gambier archipelago, all of them with rates of endemism among the highest of Indo-Pacic, only surpassed by Hawaii, Easter Island, and the Red Sea. The first part of my PhD will focus on studying the phylogenetic place of endemic species in order to retrace their evolutionary history. The second part will consist in investigating the demographic events that endemic species have been through. Have they a common history? Finally, the comparison of molecular diversity proles of endemic versus cosmopolite species will help us to characterise sh fauna of these remote archipelagos: do all the species of an archipelago have the same story? Or are endemic species really special?