Early stress experiences and stress resilience in pigs. Animal stress has substantial implications on animal productivity, health and welfare of farm animals and thus farm profitability. This project aims to examine the stress resilience in pigs. Modern pig farming is a major source of food, providing substantial nutritional, social and economic benefits in Australia and worldwide. Animal welfare is of increasing concern to the public, consumers and pork producers, and stress vulnerability is an ....Early stress experiences and stress resilience in pigs. Animal stress has substantial implications on animal productivity, health and welfare of farm animals and thus farm profitability. This project aims to examine the stress resilience in pigs. Modern pig farming is a major source of food, providing substantial nutritional, social and economic benefits in Australia and worldwide. Animal welfare is of increasing concern to the public, consumers and pork producers, and stress vulnerability is an animal health and production problem in the life of the commercial pig. This project will generate new knowledge on early life management to endow stress resilience in pigs, with expected benefits for animal welfare, farm productivity and profitability.Read moreRead less
Becoming expert navigators with tiny brains: Learning in desert ants. Desert ants with tiny brains learn to use their surrounding visual landscape to navigate. This project investigates in detail how they do that in a few carefully orchestrated trips around their nest called learning walks. Desert ants are known now to use magnetic cues to orient during their learning walks. The project also probes the role that magnetic cues play in the ants’ learning, as well as the sensory basis of the percep ....Becoming expert navigators with tiny brains: Learning in desert ants. Desert ants with tiny brains learn to use their surrounding visual landscape to navigate. This project investigates in detail how they do that in a few carefully orchestrated trips around their nest called learning walks. Desert ants are known now to use magnetic cues to orient during their learning walks. The project also probes the role that magnetic cues play in the ants’ learning, as well as the sensory basis of the perception of magnetic cues. Geomagnetic cues in the area of the nest will be artificially manipulated to test how ants use this cue. Probing the use of magnetic cues has potential benefits for projects of artificial autonomous navigation in situations when visual cues are unavailable, such as exploring a deep mine.
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Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE240100352
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$388,487.00
Summary
Reconstructing evolutionary history of termite collective nest construction. This project aims to ask and answer fundamental questions about how complex animal collective behaviour has evolved in the history of life. It combines the quantification of termite building behaviour and nest structures using a state-of-the-art video tracking technique with the latest molecular phylogenetics. This project expects to provide the first comprehensive information on termite collective building in a phyloge ....Reconstructing evolutionary history of termite collective nest construction. This project aims to ask and answer fundamental questions about how complex animal collective behaviour has evolved in the history of life. It combines the quantification of termite building behaviour and nest structures using a state-of-the-art video tracking technique with the latest molecular phylogenetics. This project expects to provide the first comprehensive information on termite collective building in a phylogenetic framework, which will be a showcase study of future studies on the evolution of complex phenotypes and resolve a debate over termite social evolution. Furthermore, it provides new knowledge of Australian native termite fauna as economically destructive pest insects.Read moreRead less
Overcoming limits of miniaturisation to enhance spatial memory capacities. Ensuring optimal efficiency at the smallest possible physical limit is a challenge for technical systems, which has been elegantly solved by biological systems. This project aims to identify how insects with miniature brains enhance their memory capacities. It will leverage previous ARC funded research on navigation of Australian ants and apply sophisticated analytical tools to quantify the neural connectivity in the brai ....Overcoming limits of miniaturisation to enhance spatial memory capacities. Ensuring optimal efficiency at the smallest possible physical limit is a challenge for technical systems, which has been elegantly solved by biological systems. This project aims to identify how insects with miniature brains enhance their memory capacities. It will leverage previous ARC funded research on navigation of Australian ants and apply sophisticated analytical tools to quantify the neural connectivity in the brain in the context of spatial memory. Expected outcomes include understanding how expensive neural tissue can be miniaturised for efficient spatial navigation, identifying the consequences of miniaturisation for developing miniature and autonomous agents, enhancing research capacity and institutional collaborations.Read moreRead less
Action selection in insects: how a microbrain knows what to do. Identifying what to do demands integrating sensory information with our current physiological state and memory of past experience to select the best possible action. This is the action selection problem. Our project aims to discover how tiny insect brains solve this fundamental problem. The project combines neural recordings from animals exploring virtual reality, behavioural analyses and computational modelling. The expected outco ....Action selection in insects: how a microbrain knows what to do. Identifying what to do demands integrating sensory information with our current physiological state and memory of past experience to select the best possible action. This is the action selection problem. Our project aims to discover how tiny insect brains solve this fundamental problem. The project combines neural recordings from animals exploring virtual reality, behavioural analyses and computational modelling. The expected outcome is a new understanding of the brain as an effective behavioural control system. This will benefit systems and comparative neuroscience. Our findings may also inspire solutions for robotic systems that must operate autonomously in remote and challenging environments such as disaster relief or exploration.Read moreRead less
Efficient strategies for visually guided flight: from insects to drones. Flying in real environments, that are densely cluttered with obstacles, is a major challenge limiting the proliferation of aerial robotic technology yet flying insects such as honeybees accomplish this task with ease. This project will seek to uncover the salient vision-based flight-control strategies implemented by insects to deal with clutter. These will be used to develop sensory and information processing frameworks for ....Efficient strategies for visually guided flight: from insects to drones. Flying in real environments, that are densely cluttered with obstacles, is a major challenge limiting the proliferation of aerial robotic technology yet flying insects such as honeybees accomplish this task with ease. This project will seek to uncover the salient vision-based flight-control strategies implemented by insects to deal with clutter. These will be used to develop sensory and information processing frameworks for implementation in miniature robotic systems which will allow them to navigate autonomously in complex environments even when GPS positioning is denied. Such capabilities will expand the operational domain and potential applications for small autonomous vehicles while improving our knowledge of insect locomotion.Read moreRead less
Life or death decisions: making fast, accurate choices in a complex world. This project aims to understand how hoverflies and honey bees, with tiny brains and sensory systems, excel at making fast and accurate decisions while on the fly in a complex world. The project will combine brain recordings with flight analyses and computational modelling to generate new knowledge on how animals may utilize movements to simplify information sampling. Expected outcomes are a novel, comprehensive understand ....Life or death decisions: making fast, accurate choices in a complex world. This project aims to understand how hoverflies and honey bees, with tiny brains and sensory systems, excel at making fast and accurate decisions while on the fly in a complex world. The project will combine brain recordings with flight analyses and computational modelling to generate new knowledge on how animals may utilize movements to simplify information sampling. Expected outcomes are a novel, comprehensive understanding of how animal movements could enhance decision speed and accuracy. This should provide substantial benefits for neuroscience, and for enhancing performance of autonomous robotic systems operating in challenging environments, such as disaster relief, mining and remote exploration. Read moreRead less
Improving the effectiveness of electronic deterrents to prevent shark bites. Existing commercial electronic shark deterrents, which attempt to deter sharks by emitting strong electric pulses into the water, are either ineffective, have limited deterrent range, or have only been tested with great white sharks. Moreover, uncertainty regarding the way in which pulsed electric fields deter sharks, and whether they may even attract sharks, hampers the development of improved deterrents. This project ....Improving the effectiveness of electronic deterrents to prevent shark bites. Existing commercial electronic shark deterrents, which attempt to deter sharks by emitting strong electric pulses into the water, are either ineffective, have limited deterrent range, or have only been tested with great white sharks. Moreover, uncertainty regarding the way in which pulsed electric fields deter sharks, and whether they may even attract sharks, hampers the development of improved deterrents. This project aims to investigate the effects of pulsed electric fields on shark physiology and behaviour, develop novel electronic pulse waveforms that maximise the deterrent effect on a range of shark species, and deliver innovative improvements in electronic shark deterrent technology that will save the lives of humans and sharks.Read moreRead less
Swarm construction: ant-inspired processes for teams of building robots. Construction and manufacturing can be dangerous, wasteful industries—prime candidates for automation by teams of mobile robot builders. However, our understanding of how to program robots for teamwork is limited. This project aims to understand how colonies of weaver ants build complex nest structures, using novel 3D-imaging and ant tracking techniques. The anticipated outcomes of the project are i) a framework for how indi ....Swarm construction: ant-inspired processes for teams of building robots. Construction and manufacturing can be dangerous, wasteful industries—prime candidates for automation by teams of mobile robot builders. However, our understanding of how to program robots for teamwork is limited. This project aims to understand how colonies of weaver ants build complex nest structures, using novel 3D-imaging and ant tracking techniques. The anticipated outcomes of the project are i) a framework for how individual-level behaviour drives structure-level outcomes, applicable to many complex systems, and ii) novel software and hardware for robot swarms that can 3D-print structures using ant inspired teamwork strategies. Benefits of the project include new construction technologies that are safer, greener, cheaper and faster.Read moreRead less
Self-organised communication as a foundation of large, complex societies. This Project aims to investigate how evolution has shaped the self-organisation of robust communication networks that emerge in large animal collectives from the actions of individuals following only simple, local rules. It expects to generate new knowledge into the fundamental principles guiding the self-organisation of networks that can sustain a complex society. Empirical work with ant colonies will inform the construct ....Self-organised communication as a foundation of large, complex societies. This Project aims to investigate how evolution has shaped the self-organisation of robust communication networks that emerge in large animal collectives from the actions of individuals following only simple, local rules. It expects to generate new knowledge into the fundamental principles guiding the self-organisation of networks that can sustain a complex society. Empirical work with ant colonies will inform the construction of simulation models to push the investigation beyond experimental limits. The Project should significantly advance our understanding of how communication networks enable the development of large societies, and thus of how to better manage autonomous man-made networks, most importantly the Internet-of-Things.Read moreRead less