Not lost in translation: how to get information from other species' calls? Information reduces life's uncertainties, and so underlies adaptive decisions in a changing world. However, the importance of information gained from other species is largely overlooked, despite the flow of information, just like resources, affecting individual fitness and population viability. This project aims to use a novel integration of visual and acoustic ecology to test how animals gain reliable information about p ....Not lost in translation: how to get information from other species' calls? Information reduces life's uncertainties, and so underlies adaptive decisions in a changing world. However, the importance of information gained from other species is largely overlooked, despite the flow of information, just like resources, affecting individual fitness and population viability. This project aims to use a novel integration of visual and acoustic ecology to test how animals gain reliable information about predators by eavesdropping on the alarm calls of other species. Thus, the project focuses on alarm calls because information about danger is critical to animal survival. The outcomes of the project could help us to understand how natural information webs form and function, and so refine predictions about the impact of environmental change on animal communities.Read moreRead less
Lucky in Love: the role of chance in sexual selection. Is luck important in the lives of animals? This project aims to ascertain how much variation in male mating success is attributable to male quality, traits or resources and how much is attributable to luck. Mating is the most important evolutionary process. Male mating success should be highly predictable: males with the best genes, most preferred displays or highest quality resources should attract females. Male mating success is, however, ....Lucky in Love: the role of chance in sexual selection. Is luck important in the lives of animals? This project aims to ascertain how much variation in male mating success is attributable to male quality, traits or resources and how much is attributable to luck. Mating is the most important evolutionary process. Male mating success should be highly predictable: males with the best genes, most preferred displays or highest quality resources should attract females. Male mating success is, however, surprisingly difficult to predict and we currently write off up to 90 per cent of the variance as noise. This project aims to quantify the relative importance of deterministic and stochastic sources of variation in male mating success. Ignored variance may be an untapped opportunity to understand selection.Read moreRead less
What drives parasite spread through social networks: lessons from lizards. Australia's biodiversity is continually threatened by new epidemics of local and foreign diseases and parasites. This project will enhance our understanding of how these diseases spread, allowing more effective controls to be developed to protect wildlife species, animal populations and, ultimately, Australian ecosystems.
Parasite transmission through social networks in the pygmy bluetongue lizard. Australia's biodiversity is continually threatened by new epidemics of diseases and parasites, some local, others from overseas. This project will provide information on how they spread so that more effective management of these diseases can be developed to protect wildlife species, animal populations and, ultimately, Australian ecosystems.
Population divergence and the thermal ecology of sexual conflict. This project aims to test how populations of introduced mosquitofish have adapted to local differences in water temperature (such as Tasmania versus Queensland). To what extent has natural selection (for survival) and sexual selection (the ability of males to acquire mates and/or females to resist unwanted matings) driven the local adaptation of populations? Many species have traits that evolve under intense sexual conflict – nota ....Population divergence and the thermal ecology of sexual conflict. This project aims to test how populations of introduced mosquitofish have adapted to local differences in water temperature (such as Tasmania versus Queensland). To what extent has natural selection (for survival) and sexual selection (the ability of males to acquire mates and/or females to resist unwanted matings) driven the local adaptation of populations? Many species have traits that evolve under intense sexual conflict – notably when males harass or coerce females into mating and females resist these attempts. It is assumed that sexual conflict traits are rarely affected by the local environment. The project will test the hypothesis that temperature can actually drive the evolution of such traits, specifically coercion and resistance to mating.Read moreRead less
The fitness consequences of age-dependent changes in cognitive abilities. This project aims to investigate health-related topics in invasive fish. The evolution of large brains suggests that smarter individuals have more offspring due to natural and sexual selection. This project aims to test if the ability to perform cognitively challenging tasks predicts reproductive success. In addition, many life history traits show a trade-off between early and late life performance. This project will test ....The fitness consequences of age-dependent changes in cognitive abilities. This project aims to investigate health-related topics in invasive fish. The evolution of large brains suggests that smarter individuals have more offspring due to natural and sexual selection. This project aims to test if the ability to perform cognitively challenging tasks predicts reproductive success. In addition, many life history traits show a trade-off between early and late life performance. This project will test this prediction to see if individuals with above average cognitive performance when young are below average when old, that is faster 'cognitive senescence', or whether some individuals stay relatively smarter than others throughout their lives.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE120100019
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$375,000.00
Summary
Miniaturisation: sensory limitations and navigational competence. Body size in most animals correlates with behavioural competence, brain capacity and sensory receptors. But since the navigational challenges faced by animals both big and small are similar, this project aims to identify the sensory and behavioural costs of miniaturisation and the strategies animals have evolved to cope with it.
Transgenerational Consequences of Different Environmental Experiences. The project aims to deliver an integrative overview of behavioural, evolutionary and environmental epigenetics. In particular, by studying why stress-related experiences of organisms (e.g. exposure to toxins) can be passed onto the future generations regardless of its seemingly fitness-reducing impacts. It also aims to test if the seemingly beneficial effect of non-stress related experiences (e.g. environmental enrichment) ca ....Transgenerational Consequences of Different Environmental Experiences. The project aims to deliver an integrative overview of behavioural, evolutionary and environmental epigenetics. In particular, by studying why stress-related experiences of organisms (e.g. exposure to toxins) can be passed onto the future generations regardless of its seemingly fitness-reducing impacts. It also aims to test if the seemingly beneficial effect of non-stress related experiences (e.g. environmental enrichment) can be inherited transgenerationally. This project involves both research synthesis (e.g. meta-analysis) and experiments on zebrafish employing cutting-edge statistical, computational and molecular methods along with behavioural assays. Also, the outcomes of the synthesis are expected to guide future work in the field. Read moreRead less
Information processing at its limits: from the dimmest habitats to the smallest sizes. Ensuring optimal information processing at the limits of size and ambient light is a challenge for technical systems, but has been elegantly solved by animals. The challenge of navigation is similar for animals of all sizes and in both day and night. This project aims to conduct a comparative analysis to identify the consequence of size and light on the information processing capacities for visual navigation. ....Information processing at its limits: from the dimmest habitats to the smallest sizes. Ensuring optimal information processing at the limits of size and ambient light is a challenge for technical systems, but has been elegantly solved by animals. The challenge of navigation is similar for animals of all sizes and in both day and night. This project aims to conduct a comparative analysis to identify the consequence of size and light on the information processing capacities for visual navigation. Outcomes of this project will reveal the behavioural and physiological adaptations needed and the costs associated with navigating in the dimmest of habitats and at the smallest of sizes. Identifying such optimal biological solutions for robust navigation will be relevant for image processing, computer vision and robotics.Read moreRead less
Can inbreeding avoidance cause the evolution of sex-biased dispersal? This project aims to combine unique long-term data with a novel Citizen Science approach to seek to provide the first complete test of the hypothesis that inbreeding avoidance can cause one of the best known patterns in mammal and bird societies - sex differences in when and how far juveniles disperse. Dispersal is a critically important ecological and evolutionary process, as it influences the fate of populations, and also de ....Can inbreeding avoidance cause the evolution of sex-biased dispersal? This project aims to combine unique long-term data with a novel Citizen Science approach to seek to provide the first complete test of the hypothesis that inbreeding avoidance can cause one of the best known patterns in mammal and bird societies - sex differences in when and how far juveniles disperse. Dispersal is a critically important ecological and evolutionary process, as it influences the fate of populations, and also determines the individuals with which a disperser will spend the remainder of its life. It therefore shapes the likelihood that kin will interact to cooperate or compete, and determines the pool of individuals with which the disperser can mate.Read moreRead less