Gustavo Requena, also known as Billy, was born in Sorocaba, São Paulo, Brazil. He completed a B.Sc. in Biology at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) in 2004. Between 2003 and 2005, he studied the evolution of paternal care using the harvestman Iporangaia pustulosa as model organism to test the hypothesis of evolution of exclusive male care as a sexually selected trait. Using both field observations and experiments he demonstrated that most of the predictions of this hypothesis were supported and that paternal care in I. pustulosa seems to be a sexually selected behavior. Between 2006 and 2007, he studied the costs and benefits of male egg-guarding behavior in I. pustulosa for his master’s degree thesis at Universidade Federal de Uberlândia (UFU). He discovered that the paternal care in I. pustulosa increases offspring survival and that the benefits seem to be extraordinarily large in relation to exceptionally low costs to the caring males, since they did not present higher mortality than non-caring males nor loose mating opportunities while guarding the eggs. His Ph.D. thesis focus on the relationship between the potential reproductive rates of males and their efforts to assure the paternity of the offspring they will guard. He will investigate this question in three lineages of harvestmen in which paternal care has independently evolved. His thesis is co-directed by Dr. Diogo Meyer from the Instituto de Biociências, Universidade de São Paulo (USP), Brazil.

Papers by Requena:

Requena, G.S.; B.A. Buzatto & G. Machado. 2007. Habitat use, phenology, and gregariousness of the neotropical psocopteran Cerastipsocus sivorii (Psocoptera: Psocidae). Sociobiology, 49:197-214.

Buzatto, B.A.; G.S. Requena; E.G. Martins & G. Machado. 2007. Effects of maternal care on the lifetime reproductive success of females in a neotropical harvestman. Journal of Animal Ecology, 76: 937–945.

Machado, G.; G.S. Requena; B.A. Buzatto; F. Osses & L.M. Rossetto. 2004. Five new cases of paternal care in harvestmen (Arachnida: Opiliones): implications for the evolution of male guarding in the neotropical family Gonyleptidae. Sociobiology, 44: 577-598.