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Home Women Business News Which Butterflies Might Go Extinct From Climate Change? Ask This Brazilian Scientist!

Which Butterflies Might Go Extinct From Climate Change? Ask This Brazilian Scientist!


Brazilian scientist Mariana Pires Braga studies the evolutionary arms race between butterflies and their host plants, which in turn provides clues about how well butterflies may adapt to the challenges of climate change and other changes to the landscape in their home habitats.

Braga, currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, says studying the interactions between butterflies and the plants their larvae feed on is important because without host plants there are no butterflies.

“Understanding how the butterflies change in their ability to feed on different plants is very important, especially in the face of global changes in climate, land use, and consequently, where species live,” Braga says, adding that her main project in the past few years has been to develop computer programs that can infer how ecological interactions between species change over evolutionary time, that is, millions of years.

“In my next project, which is financed by the Swedish Research Council, I will try to forecast which European butterflies are likely to adapt to new host plants and which will likely get extinct (at least locally) in the near future, because their host plants won’t be available anymore,” she says, “Even though I focus on butterflies, because that is the system I know best, the methods we develop can be used to study many other systems, such as host-parasite and plant-pollinator interactions.”

Global South Science

Braga says it would make sense to conduct this research in her native South America instead of Europe because there are so many more butterflies and plants in the tropical forests there, but there isn’t the necessary data to do such an analysis in South America.

“We need to start investing more in science in the Global South so that we can start closing this gap,” she says, “And no one knows this best than us, the scientists from the Global South.”

Braga says that a serious problem with ecological data is that most of the information researchers have, and therefore, most of the theories developed from that data, come from Europe and North America.

“This is a strong bias that can only be overcome with investment in science in the Global South,” she says.

From Brazil to Sweden And Beyond

Braga was born in a mountainous region close to Rio de Janeiro, but moved to Curitiba, in the south of Brazil, when she was 7 years old.

“I’ve always liked animals but was never a geek,” she says, “In school, I’ve always liked Math, but in high school I discovered Biology and decided to go for it.

Braga would go on to do her undergraduate degree in biology and a master’s degree in Ecology at Universidade Federal do Paraná, where she had the opportunity to do internships in several research labs between 2006 and 2013.

“These experiences in different labs really helped me understand what it means to be a scientist and what kinds of research were not for me,” she says.

Braga chose Stockholm University for her PhD and moved to Sweden in 2014 without ever been to Europe before.

“My choice to go to Sweden was only possible because one scientist from the US who was visiting our lab in Brazil while I was a master student told me I should get in touch with the person who would eventually be my main PhD advisor… And everything else followed from there,” she says, adding that she then moved to the US for her current postdoc.

“During my PhD I had the chance to work with many collaborators and one of them turned out to be my postdoc host, so, networking is definitely important in opening up opportunities for early-career scientists,” she says.

Another scientist from the Global South at the Washington University in St Louis is lizard scientist Jhan Salazar from Colombia.

MORE FROM FORBESFor This Colombian Scientist, Lizards Led To A Life Of Science!

He’s a PhD researcher working on the evolution and ecology of anole lizards and he was also the winner of the Young Afro-Colombian in 2019.



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