Ecology and Evolution Seminar Series
Seminars from the RSB Division of Ecology and Evolution (E&E).
04
Mar
2021
9am 4 March 2021
Martin Wikelski, Co-director, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour
I’ll share some of the latest data on animal movement around the planet. I will highlight how this helps us to preserve biodiversity, to secure our global food supplies, to anticipate pandemics and potentially to predict natural disasters.
15
Apr
2021
9–10am 15 April 2021
Dieter Lukas, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig
There is great variation in how individuals interact with each other. Variation in sociality has been argued to reflect adaptations to the environment, but the exact links between local conditions and social behaviors are often unclear.
Past events
19
Feb
2021
E&E PhD Exit Seminar: Personality, sociality, and democracy: insights from a wild kangaroo population »
The study of animal ‘personality’, or consistent individual differences in behaviour, has received much attention in the last two decades, but several important questions remain unclear.
11
Dec
2020
E&E PhD Exit Seminar: Life in cold blood: phenotypic development in a warming world »
Animals live in an ever-changing world, but environmental perturbations are occurring at an alarming rate - threatening biodiversity and population persistence.
08
Dec
2020
E&E PhD Exit Seminar: Mutations, Models and Probability »
I examine how some established population genetic models can be extended to accommodate insights from newer data and analytic methods.
04
Dec
2020
E&E PhD Exit Seminar: Cracking egg investment: maternal investment strategies in cuckoos and their hosts »
Individuals can benefit by varying their investment in offspring. The optimal amount of investment may vary in relation to both climatic conditions and social conditions (such as the number of carers for the offspring).
27
Nov
2020
E&E PhD Exit Seminar: Micro- and macro-evolution of micro- and macro-lizards »
Why do organisms look the way they do? Why do they live where they do? Wy are some groups more diverse than others? These basic questions are often addressed at different scales using a particular set of methods.
27
Nov
2020
E&E PhD Exit Seminar: Habitat highs and lows: Using multi-platform LiDAR to assess relationships between vegetation structure and landscape use by birds and reptiles »
Vegetation structure is an important habitat element for many animals.
13
Nov
2020
E&E PhD Exit Seminar: Phylogeny and systematics of the longhorn beetle genus Rhytiphora »
The taxonomy and phylogenetic relationships of longhorn beetles have been debated for decades, with neither morphological nor molecular data reaching a consistent solution.
12
Nov
2020
E&E Webinar: Rapid evolution in silence: adaptive signal loss in the Pacific field cricket »
By nature of their conspicuousness, sexual signals can cause a conflict between natural and sexual selection, with natural selection favoring a decrease in exaggeration of an ornament and sexual selection favoring an increase.
10
Nov
2020
Joint ANU & University of Melbourne BioSciences Seminar: An alternative to the current system of publication: Peer Community In (PCI) »
The Peer Community in (PCI) project offers an alternative to the current system of publication - which is particularly expensive and not very transparent.
06
Nov
2020
E&E PhD Exit Seminar: How important is sexual chemistry? Pollination of Pterostylis orchids by male fungus gnats »
The cross-kingdom mimicry of female insect sex pheromones by sexually deceptive orchids has fascinated evolutionary biologists ever since the importance of chemistry in pollination by sexual deception was first recognised.
29
Oct
2020
E&E Webinar: The Red Queens and the evolution of sex »
Any antagonistic interaction has the potential of favouring sex, just as predicted by the "Red Queen hypothesis" in the case of host-parasite interactions. Is it really the case?
22
Oct
2020
E&E Webinar: Sexual selection from a life history perspective »
Reproductive success is strongly related to the display of extravagant sexual traits, such as the striking coloration of some bird species.
15
Oct
2020
E&E Webinar: Stress and survival in vertebrates: transgenerational effects of stress, environmental context, and why it matters »
Ecological stressors such as predation can shape ecosystems, driving prey population and community dynamics through indirect, non-consumptive effects that may cascade across generations through parental effects.
08
Oct
2020
E&E Webinar: Haploid gametic selection in animals and its evolutionary consequences »
Biphasic life cycles with alternating diploid and haploid gametic phases are a traits shared by all sexually reproducing eukaryotes.
01
Oct
2020
E&E Webinar: Wings, feathers, flight: the PhyloG2P approach to understanding bird biology »
Scott Edwards is an acclaimed evolutionary biologist specialising in molecular evolution in birds.