News & events
News
A study led by ANU has discovered how a mother knows her chicks and can spot an imposter in her nest, even if it looks almost identical to her own chicks.
Dan Rosauer is fascinated by the incredibly uneven spatial distribution of biological diversity at all levels, particularly centres of phylogenetic endemism.
Jennie Mallela conducts multidisciplinary research combining ecological, biological and geochemical research techniques to understand how environmental disturbance will impact reef function and health in the future.
Angela McGaughran is primarily interested in combining genomic and ecological approaches to examine evolutionary processes in natural populations.
ANU has a long history of pioneering research into alpine trees. The work Professor Ralph Slatyer undertook in the 1970's was used to show that the tree line was defined by temperature, not altitude, which explains why Australia has a lower tree line than most other countries.
Konzo is a neurological disease that causes irreversible paralysis of the legs, often in women and young children. It's caused by malnutrition and consumption of high levels of a cyanide compound found in the cassava plant - which happens to be a common staple food in tropical Africa.
Events
Competition is often proposed to drive niche segregation along multiple axes in speciose communities. Understanding spatial partitioning of foraging areas is particularly important in species that are constrained to a central place.
Classical weed biocontrol refers to the deliberate introduction of co-evolved host-specific natural enemy of a weed.
In nature, organisms do not exist in isolation. They interact with surrounding biotic and abiotic components to form complex ecological networks, such as food webs. It is the states and dynamics of these networks that then foster biodiversity at the community level or beyond.
Information about danger is vital for wildlife, yet can be difficult to gain in complex environments. Anthropogenic and other noise can disrupt acoustic communication, and predators may be visually hidden in cluttered environments.
New Guinea is the heart of global linguistic diversity. New Guinea makes up 1% of the global land area as an island, containing less than <0.2% of the world's population and 20% of all languages. The obvious linguistic and anthropological question is why?