News & events
News
A new approach to analysing museum specimens has revealed a massive decline in Fiji’s native ant species since the arrival of humans to the islands
Australia’s ski industry is at risk of major disruptions and shorter seasons if the current level of climate pollution continues, according to new modelling from Protect Our Winters Australia (POW) and The Australian National University (ANU).
What’s that in my nest? How the evolutionary arms race between cuckoos and hosts creates new species
In new research published in Science, biologists show how coevolution drives the creation of new species of cuckoos.
Working on the Clever Cockie Project, Dr Julia Penndorf is tracking all the odd but fascinating behaviours that Sydney and Canberra cockatoos get up to in urban environments.
We have a small and vanishing window to collect bees before the inevitable rapid spread of the varroa mites, and the mass die-offs, occur.
Australia can lay claim to two new native mammal species, discovered as part of collaborative new research published in the journal Molecular Ecology.
Events
Hybridisation events – together with other biological processes such as recombination and incomplete lineage sorting – can create gene tree discordance, where different genomic regions describe different evolutionary histories.
In this talk, I introduce how white-winged choughs, highly social cooperative breeders, integrate multiple features of alarm and contact communication to coordinate antipredator behaviour and maintain cohesion.
Developmental conditions are powerful drivers of phenotypic plasticity. Environmental factors, such as temperature, can directly program fitness-associated phenotypes, while maternal effects act as indirect cues that shape the developmental environment.
Using Eucalypts representing widely contrasting range sizes and home climates across Australia, I explore whether greater geographic distribution size or climate of origin are associated with the ability of these plants to acclimate their photosynthetic and respiratory apparatus or heat tolerance thresholds.
Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used across fields as diverse as ecology, archaeology, epidemiology, and conservation biology.
The majority of studies into the Australian orchid flora and associated funga have thus far been narrow in scope and focused either on a macro- or microevolutionary scale. In this thesis, I studied the Australian terrestrial orchid flora and its associated funga as a unified system spanning from the macro to microevolutionary scale.