Dr. Jana Bedek is a recipient of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship

As part of this prestigious fellowship, she will investigate the foundations of the evolutionary potential of organisms—that is, the mechanisms that are crucial for the survival of animal and plant species in today’s rapidly changing world.

The research approach is designed retrospectively, through analyses of terrestrial crustaceans that have successively crossed two ecological boundaries: first, they successfully colonized karst subterranean habitats, and later groundwater environments. Both colonization events occurred multiple times, across different crustacean lineages, as if an “evolutionary experiment” had been repeated in nature. Such a model system, using comparative analyses, enables the exploration of key questions that hierarchically probe deeper into the fundamental mechanisms of evolution.

Do organisms change in similar ways (convergently) when transitioning from one environment to another? Do convergent changes at the phenotypic level coincide with convergence in genomic regions? Does the sequence of colonization events accelerate or slow down the rate of adaptation to a new environment? Which genomic regions are crucial for adaptation to new environments? What role does horizontal gene transfer play in this process? The research will combine behavioral-physiological experiments, analyses of the evolution of functional phenotypic traits, and analyses of the evolution of selected genomic regions.

With some luck, the results of these analyses will contribute to the pressing question of the extent to which current species are subject to extinction in a changing environment, and to what extent they will be able to adapt to upcoming changes. The work will be carried out at the Department of Biology, Biotechnical Faculty, within the research group for speleobiology.

Dr. Jana Bedek is currently employed at the Croatian Biospeleological Society, and in the autumn she will join the Biotechnical Faculty. She is actively engaged in studying the subterranean biodiversity of the Dinaric Karst, particularly the faunistics and taxonomy of woodlice.

Associate Professor Dr. Cene Fišer is a member of the research group for speleobiology at the Department of Biology, Biotechnical Faculty. His research focuses on macroecology and the evolution of subterranean crustaceans, with amphipods of the genus Niphargus as the key model organism.