Spring isn't all it's quacked up to be. Pollen levels are high, magpies are terrorising cyclists and pedestrians alike, and protective duck parents are in attack mode.
Our new research unites genomic sequencing and museum collections to reconstruct the evolutionary tale of native rodents, including many extinct and elusive species – and they have a fascinating origin story.
If swooping season strikes fear into your heart, you're not alone. Fortunately, Dr Chaminda Ratnayake from the ANU Research School of Biology has the intel you need to navigate the great outdoors this spring.
To measure the speed of adaptive evolution in the wild, we studied 19 populations of birds and mammals over several decades. We found they were evolving at twice to four times the speed suggested by earlier work.
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.
While we know many things about E. coli under laboratory conditions, relatively little is known about the ecology of this bacterium in the environment.
Each cell division comes with the risk of mutations that could eventually lead to cancer. How do organisms attain their mature sizes without succumbing to cancer? What happens when large-bodied lineages shrink in size? Can cancer risk constrain body size evolution?