The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Trine Bilde, Department of Bioscience, an ERC Starting Grant of DKK 11 million (approximately EUR 1.5 million) for a research project called Ecogenomics of Inbreeding. The project will map the genetic and evolutionary consequences of inbreeding by studying natural populations of social spiders.

2011.12.08 | Christina Troelsen

A lengthy application process has now come to an end for Trine Bilde, an evolutionary biology researcher at Aarhus University. The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded the Aarhus researcher a so-called Starting Grant of DKK 11 million (approximately EUR 1.5 million). This means that she can make a start on a five-year research project for which she has spent the last three years preparing the theoretical and technical foundation. Now all her hard work has paid off.

See video interview with Trine Bilde (in Danish only):

“It’s immensely satisfying, because it means that we can start something long-term that we’d hardly dared dream about. Normally, you work with much shorter horizons than five years, so this is very important. The five years give us an opportunity for a large and heavy project, so you end up feeling as though you’ve shifted the entire field and contributed new knowledge,” she says.

The grant enables her to employ four staff members to help her over the next five years. The project will start on 1 January and it involves studying groups of spiders that do not mate with other spiders outside their own group. The result is natural inbreeding, which can be used to gain knowledge to help predict the chances of different populations adapting to climate change.

“Inbreeding has mostly been investigated in experimental studies, and particularly in domestic animals, where you try to avoid inbreeding. Now we have an opportunity to supplement existing knowledge with studies of a group of animals in which inbreeding is natural. In this way, we can try to understand the consequences of inbreeding in natural animal populations. We want to study the entire genetic code for the long-term effects of inbreeding, including the impact on the adaptation potential and formation of the species,” Associate Professor Bilde explains.

Together with her group of researchers, she will now travel around the world to observe and study different groups of spiders. These spiders live in South Africa, India, and the Middle East, but the new grant makes it possible to include an even broader range of spiders.

“We’ve also got plans to conduct field work in South America. There’s a completely different family of spiders that can be compared with the family we’re currently studying in South Africa, and we’d like to compare these two different ecosystems to enable us to conduct a comparative study. There’s every reason to believe that we’ll find parallel evolution across species and continents, which will enable us to generalise and draw broad conclusions,” she explains.

The group will initially travel to Madagascar to compare spiders from the island with spiders of the same species on the African mainland.

Anelosimus eximius is a social spider from South America. Shown here is a colony of spiders feeding on a large prey – a grasshopper caught in their web.

Stegodyphus lineatus is a subsocial spider – whose young live in family groups in the mother’s nest when they are small. She looks after the spiderlings, and they end up eating her.

About the project

The Starting Grant project – Ecogenomics of Inbreeding – will study evolutionary consequences of inbreeding in natural populations of social spiders. These spiders live in large colonies and work together to tend their young and catch prey. At the same time, they have an inbred mating system and a skewed gender ratio with approximately one male to every eight females. These life history traits can lead to a reduction in genetic variation and thereby restrict the potential of the populations to adapt to environmental changes. The project will use molecular genetic methods to map the genetic and evolutionary consequences of inbreeding.

Read more about the project at http://www.spiderlab.dk

About Trine Bilde

Trine Bilde carries out research into evolutionary biology, with a focus on the evolution of mating systems, social behaviour, and sexual selection. She is an associate professor at the Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, where her duties include lecturing on behavioural biology and zoology.

Associate Professor Bilde studied biology at Aarhus University, where she completed her PhD degree in 1999, based on studies of predator–prey interactions and life history biology among arthropods. She subsequently spent a period as a postdoctoral scholar at Ben Gurion University, Israel, and was also awarded an EU Marie Curie Fellowship for research at Uppsala University, Sweden. Prior to her appointment as associate professor, she worked at Aarhus University on a Steno Scholarship and subsequently a Carlsberg Research Fellowship.

Contact information

Trine Bilde
Genetics and Ecology, Department of Bioscience
Aarhus University
Ny Munkegade 116
Building 1540, room 224
8000 Aarhus C
trine.bilde@biology.au.dk
Direct phone +45 8715 6565
Mobile phone +45 6020 2702