Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE190101338
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$373,711.00
Summary
Building your future: builder-building coevolution in animal architectures. This project aims to reconstruct how animal architectures change throughout time and how this affects body shapes and functions of their builders. By clarifying the biological role of building behaviour this project will assist in predicting long term responses of wildlife, ecosystems and human life to a changing environment. The project expects to be achieved by comparing the structure, assembly and mechanical performan ....Building your future: builder-building coevolution in animal architectures. This project aims to reconstruct how animal architectures change throughout time and how this affects body shapes and functions of their builders. By clarifying the biological role of building behaviour this project will assist in predicting long term responses of wildlife, ecosystems and human life to a changing environment. The project expects to be achieved by comparing the structure, assembly and mechanical performance of animal architectures with animal morphology and performance in a global phylogenetic framework. This is critical for strategic planning of wildlife and landscape management.Read moreRead less
Predictability in evolution: From behaviour to genome. This project aims to determine whether evolution is primarily unpredictable and stochastic, or predictable and constrained along certain pathways. By using a natural experiment that caused wood-feeding cockroaches to evolve into soil-burrowing cockroaches in response to climate change millions of years ago, this project will determine how the genomes of these organisms responded. This will show whether the same molecular changes are repeated ....Predictability in evolution: From behaviour to genome. This project aims to determine whether evolution is primarily unpredictable and stochastic, or predictable and constrained along certain pathways. By using a natural experiment that caused wood-feeding cockroaches to evolve into soil-burrowing cockroaches in response to climate change millions of years ago, this project will determine how the genomes of these organisms responded. This will show whether the same molecular changes are repeatedly used in the evolution of complex traits, including burrow construction. This will contribute to the understanding of how predictable evolution is at the molecular level, and provide insights into how genomes change in response to prolonged climate change.Read moreRead less