Date:	Wed, December 3, 2014
Time:	11:00
Place:	West Hall 2

Abstract: This talk is my PhD proposal defense. The project aims an understanding of the adaptive dynamics of the symbiosis between corals and zooxanthellae, the role of symbiosis as a regulation mechanism of coral reef homeostasis, and the responses of these processes to multiple environmental stressors. Trait-based modelling approach will be used to investigate different research questions. Such a method has often been used to describe the evolution and adaptation of phenotypic traits within population of organisms and assumes the rate of change in the trait to be proportional to the gradient of the fitness of the organism, the fitness representing the overall gain of the specie with respect to the trait value that it has adopted.