News & events
News
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.
The biologists and the linguists at ANU might sit on different sides of the campus, but Professor Lindell Bromham from the ANU Research School of Biology says it wasn’t difficult to see the benefits in the two disciplines coming together.
Mention the superb lyrebird, and you’ll probably hear comments on their uncanny mimicry of human sounds, their presence on the 10 cent coin, and their stunning tail. Far less known – but equally, if not more, impressive – is the Albert’s lyrebird.
A new study from researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) rolls back the curtain on half a century of evidence detailing the impact of climate change on more than 60 different bird species.
Have you opened your post-lockdown wardrobe, only to discover some of your beautiful summer clothes have holes in them? You’re probably blaming clothes moths but the real culprits are the larvae (caterpillars).
A world-first study warns 1,500 endangered languages could no longer be spoken by the end of this century.
Events
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.
Plants synthesize an amazing diversity of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that facilitate interactions with their environment, ranging from attracting pollinators and seed dispersers to protecting themselves from pathogens, parasites, and herbivores.