I’ve always been fascinated by the species diversity surrounding me. From a very young age, I started documenting it as best as I could with a cheap camera in my garden. As I grew up, I became increasingly fascinated by the actual possibility of identifying and putting a name on any living being that came across my lens, eventually leading me to develop a true passion for insect identification. 

Along with this passion came a lot of questions, such as how and why have so many species evolved and how have they acquired the diversity of colours and shapes we see today? These evolutionary questions guided me as a student to study how species evolve, ultimately falling in love with phylogenetics, evolutionary biology and eventually phylogenomics and systematics.

When I first met Julien Haran in 2023, I wasn’t particularly interested in weevils, but the evolutionary stories he told me immediately caught my attention. I therefore started a six-month internship at CBGP (Centre de Biologie pour la Gestion des Populations, France) on the fascinating evolution of host-plant use in Smicronychini (Curculioninae). This work resulted in my first published paper, which included a phylogeny of Smicronychini and proposed a new evolutionary hypothesis explaining, more generally, how phytophagous insects can make host-plant shifts through ecological opportunities.

And as you may know, once you start studying weevils, it’s hard to go back, as there is so much to explore and be passionate about! This was when Julien introduced me to pollinating weevils and the tremendous diversity of species, plant-insect interactions and exciting evolutionary processes that remain to be discovered. In this context, I managed to be granted a PhD scholarship with Julien Haran and Rémi Allio to study the tribe Ochyromerini, a largely understudied group of weevils from tropical Asia and Africa that includes both antagonistic and mutualistic species. During this PhD, I designed a new set of phylogenetic markers for weevils to reconstruct the phylogeny of Ochyromerini weevils and made this new probe set available for the weevil community. I was also able to make a global review and catalogue of the tribe, which allowed me to develop an expertise in this group and lay the foundations for future work on this tribe.

I just defended my thesis last month, but I’ll definitely continue working on Ochyromerini taxonomy as I prepare my postdoctoral project. I’m hoping to keep working with weevils and exploring their incredible evolutionary history whenever the opportunity arises!