Postdoctoral research fellow at CONICET, Institute of Animal Diversity and Ecology (IDEA-UNC-CONICET).
I studied Biological Sciences at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and obtained my degree in Biology in 2014. In 2020 I got my Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from the same university. Much of my research focuses on interpreting behavioral and reproductive patterns from a post-copulatory sexual selection view. Accordingly, my main interest lies in finding evolutionary explanations for such patterns, as well as understanding the mechanisms that generate them. I currently have a post-doctoral fellow in Laboratorio de Biología Reproductiva y Evolución. Currently I have expanded my line of research, but without leaving aside my main interest: Reproductive Biology in an Evolutionary Framework. During my post-doctorate, I will try to discover the effect of the contamination of the Suquía River (main watercourse of Córdoba city) on the reproductive biology of riverbank spiders mediated by insects with aquatic stages (the prey of these animals). Taking into account the alarming level of pollution recorded in the river and the lack of information on the transfer of pollutants from watercourses to the terrestrial food chains, this study is relevant and new in the country and even worldwide. I will cover this study from several aspects, among which are the behavioral, physiological, and morphological ones. This research will be carried out under the direction of Dr. Alfredo Peretti and Dr. Andrea Hued and will rely on the collaboration of Dr. Matías Izquierdo and Dr. Diego Uñates, as well as Dr. Lucia Calbacho-Rosa. At the same time, I will continue working and collaborating in different projects on the reproductive biology of arachnids, among which we can mention spiders of the Pholcidae and Tetragnathidae family and solpugids of the ammotherchidae family.
E-mail: francocarg@gmail.com