We may be in the middle of an insect mass extinction. The once abundant Rocky Mountain locust was last seen in 1902. Under the Mikheyev Group, Peiyu Yuan used data from a related extant locust species and comparative genomics to identify artifacts in museum data of the Rocky Mountain locust.
Researchers from the Australian National University (ANU) have discovered several new species of butterflies and moths in Northern Australia, identifying a conservation stronghold of national and international significance.
The amazing diversity we see in Australian animal developed early and has slowed considerably in the last 10 million years, say Ian Brennan and Scott Keogh from the ANU Research School of Biology.
Native Australian orchids have featured strongly in Rod's research, where he has explored a range of fascinating ecological, biochemical, molecular and evolutionary questions.
Jonathan Losos will speak on his career-long experimental research program manipulating the presence of lizards on small islands in the Bahamas to test ecological and evolutionary hypotheses.
There is an increasing body of evidence for the existence of animal cultures. Recent work has also suggested cultural traits can be subject to selection, changing in form, function or distribution.
Praying mantises are the only insects known to have stereo vision. We used a comparative approach to determine how the mechanisms underlying
stereopsis in mantises differ from those underlying primate stereo vision.
Having spent much of the last 15 years trying to improve molecular phylogenetics, I had formed the fairly firm view that my research was very interesting (of course!!!) but rather useless in the short term.