Hello!
I'm Ana Cristina Crestani.

Frugivory

My research interest addresses the frugivory process with a focus on the role played by plant and animal traits. The main contribution of my work is to understand the outcome of these interactions linking plant's biochemical compounds with the feeding strategy of animals. This approach provides a new perspective of the frugivory process as a gradient in which not all species eat the same type of fruit.

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Chemical Ecology

To better understand which plant traits are related to attractiveness and nutritional rewards, I am going deeper into chemical ecology, which is a strong tool to answer mutual interaction questions. For fruit-eating animals, nutritional information, color, and smell act as signals and are the main ways for animals to detect and consume fruits. Therefore, using fruit’ color, aroma, and nutrients the proposed project aims to test the hypothesis that fruit signals are optimized for animal foraging strategy and sensory ecology, integrating multiple communication channels to guide animals to the fruit and thus facilitate effective seed dispersal.

 

Birds Traits

I am investigating the relationship between animals' forage sense and fruits' phytochemical characteristics to address the way that certain groups of frugivores tend to interact more strongly with some groups of fruits. I am also interested in understanding how different groups of animals employ different sensorial and foraging behaviors following the fruit's color and scent.