Abstract: Dome C in Antarctica provides exceptional conditions for photometry thanks to the continuous night during the Antarctic winter, a high clear sky fraction, low wind speeds, and a cold and dry atmosphere. The ASTEP project (Antarctic Search for Transiting ExoPlanets) aims at detecting and characterising transiting exoplanets and qualifying this site for photometry in the visible. The main instrument, a 40 cm telescope, has been designed to perform high precision photometry under the extreme conditions of the Antarctic winter and has operated at the Concordia station since 2010. It will be upgraded with two new cameras and a new camera box in order to provide simultaneous two-colour photometry and substantially increase its throughput. The new setup will be operational for the winter campaign 2021 and will allow us to discover transiting exoplanets orbiting bright stars in particular low mass exoplanets, temperate exoplanets, exoplanets around young stars, and to refine the ephemerides of exoplanets discovered by the TESS mission. These observations will provide targets for first characterisation with the CHEOPS mission and atmospheric studies with the JWST and ARIEL missions. In this talk, I will describe the science goals and the upgrade of the ASTEP telescope.

Abstract: Dispersal represents a key life-history trait with several implications for the fitness of organisms, population dynamics and resilience, local adaptation, meta-population dynamics, range shifting, and biological invasions. Plastic and evolutionary changes of dispersal traits have been intensively studied over the past decades in entomology, in particular in wing-dimorphic insects for which literature reviews are available. Importantly, dispersal polymorphism also exists in wing-monomorphic and wingless insects, and except for butterflies, fewer syntheses are available. In this perspective, by integrating the very latest research in the fast moving field of insect dispersal ecology, this review article provides an overview of our current knowledge of dispersal polymorphism in insects. In a first part, some of the most often used experimental methodologies for the separation of dispersers and residents in wing-monomorphic and wingless insects are presented. Then, the existing knowledge on the morphological and life-history trait differences between resident and disperser phenotypes is synthetized. In a last part, the effects of range expansion on dispersal traits and performance is examined, in particular for insects from range edges and invasion fronts. Finally, some research perspectives are proposed in the last part of the review.