FABIEN GÉNIN

Fabien Génin was trained in France (Poitiers and Paris) as an ethologist and a physiologist. He conducted his doctoral research in the CNRS/MNHN laboratory of Brunoy, working on captive and wild mouse lemurs, small nocturnal primates endemic to Madagascar. He was awarded his PhD in 2002 and conducted three post-doctoral studies in Madagascar and South Africa, shifting his research focus to more ecological questions, in particular the role of environmental variability on life history, working on a newly re-discovered species of mouse lemur, the reddish-grey mouse lemur of the southern xerophytic thicket.

When he arrived in South Africa in 2006, he was associated first with the Natal Museum in Pietermaritzburg, and subsequently with the University of Fort Hare. His new environment caused him to extend his interest to new fields of research, including ontogeny, speciation and historical biogeography, and started to work on African primates, in particular bushbabies and samango monkeys.

He considers his best contributions to science to include:

• his long-term study of the Malagasy reddish-grey mouse lemur (Microcebus griseorufus) that yielded evidence of various adaptations to hypervariable environments (Génin, 2008);
• his proposal that gummivory evolved as a consequence of unpredictable environments and food supply, which was published in collaboration with Judith Masters (APIES) and Joerg Ganzhorn (University of Hamburg, Germany) as a chapter in an edited volume dedicated to exudativory (Génin et al., 2010);
• his contribution to a coolaborative study on cheirogaleid dwarfing (phyletic decrease in body size), also interpreted as an effect of environmental hypervariability (Masters et al., 2014).

His current research deals with the complex link between macro- and micro-evolution and the relationships between habitat preference and specific-mate recognition systems, with an emphasis on acoustic communication. He is currently supervising three PhD students, one MSc student and two Honours students working in Madagascar, Cameroon and South Africa, on lemurs, bushbabies and samango monkeys.