We are currently welcoming expressions of interest from researchers interested in pursuing PhD research in the broad area of the evolution of metabolic rate and life history. Full details are available here.
When applying for funding, we are given space to convince the grant reader that our research track records are important. We are given the chance to convince the reader that someone, somewhere has cared about our research enough to publish it, read it, cite it, or otherwise take an interest. There are a number of ways that this can be done, though many are somewhat obvious: Continue reading
Frank Seebacher, Craig R. White, Craig E. Franklin. Nature Climate Change. Understanding how climate change affects natural populations remains one of the greatest challenges for ecology and management of natural resources. Animals can remodel their physiology to compensate for the effects of temperature variation, and this physiological plasticity, or acclimation, can confer resilience to climate change. The current lack of a comprehensive analysis of the capacity for physiological plasticity across taxonomic groups and geographic regions, however, constrains predictions of the impacts of climate change. Here, we assembled the largest database to date to establish the current state of knowledge of physiological plasticity in ectothermic animals. We show that acclimation decreases the sensitivity to temperature and climate change of freshwater and marine animals, but less so in terrestrial animals. Animals from more stable environments have greater capacity for acclimation, and there is a significant trend showing that the capacity for thermal acclimation increases with decreasing latitude. Despite the capacity for acclimation, climate change over the past 20 years has already resulted in increased physiological rates of up to 20%, and we predict further future increases under climate change. The generality of these predictions is limited, however, because much of the world is drastically undersampled in the literature, and these undersampled regions are the areas of greatest need for future research efforts.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2457.html
2013 has been another big year for the lab! Five honours students completed, and all received well-deserved Class I grades – Hugh Winwood-Smith and Niky Wu each received the top grade in their cohort; we received ARC Discovery funding for a project led by Professor Dustin Marshall at Monash University – the project will be conducted in collaboration with Michel Loreau from CNRS; Craig was promoted to Associate Professor and received an ARC Future Fellowship; 15 papers were published; Natalie Schimpf received her PhD; Julian Beaman joined the lab to undertake a PhD; and Craig, Lesley, and Taryn all attended the ANZSCPB meeting in Melbourne!
Hugh and Niky receive the Honours Prize
Although this front page has been static, there has been a great deal of activity in the Evolutionary Physiology lab during 2012 and into 2013. Natalie Schimpf has completed her PhD, Pieter Arnold has commenced a PhD, five new honours students have started, Phil Matthews has returned (but will leave again in 2014 for UBC), and a suite of new publications have appeared. Busy times!
The lab has grown significantly in 2012, with the addition of three new honours students as well as the return of Phil Matthews from Adelaide. Phil will take up an Australian Research Council DECRA in April, and will continue his work on discontinuous gas exchange in insects. Recent publications from the lab include the first paper from Nat’s PhD showing that cockroaches that breathe discontinuously survivive food and water deprivation better than those that do not. Other recent publications have examined the mechanistic basis of discontinuous gas exchange in several species of insect, including beetles, grasshoppers, and our ever-popular cockroaches. We have also documented the scaling of metabolic rate in marine bryozoans, the association between bone vasculature and activity capacity in dinosaurs, the effect of UV-B on metabolic rate in tadpoles, and metabolic cold adaptation in fish. Full details of recent publications are available here.
A new paper, just published in Ecology, examines day-to-day variation in the energy expenditure of great cormorants Phalacrocorax carbo at the northern limit of the range, above the Arctic circle. Using a biologging approach, we measured metabolic rate and diving behaviour every second day for a complete year. We expected these birds to have exceptionally high rates of energy expenditure, because they live in a cold environment, forage in sub-zero water, and have a partially wettable plumage. However, contrary to this expectation, we show that great cormorants in theArctic are extremely efficient foragers and thereby minimise their foraging time and actually show very low rates of energy expenditure.
The results of Robyn Willis’ honours research, supervised by Dave Merritt and Craig White, has shown that bioluminescence is cheap for the Australian glowworm Arachnocampa flava. Her paper has just appeared online in the Journal of Comparative Physiology B.
Phil Matthews’ latest research, available online in The American Naturalist, proposes a new Neural Hypothesis for discontinuous gas exchange in insects. This hypothesis suggests that discontinuous gas exchange results from the thoracic and abdominal ganglia regulating ventilation in the absence of control from higher neural centers, and it is indicative of a sleeplike state.
Matthews, P.G.D. and White, C.R. (In press) Discontinuous gas exchange in insects: Is it all in their heads? American Naturalist.
A new paper, accepted this week for publication in Ibis, examines the relationship between sea surface temperature and rates of population change of great cormorants that breed near Disko Island, Greenland. Cormorant populations in this area increase in size when sea temperature is high and decrease when temperatures are low, suggesting that Arctic warming will lead to an increase in the population of these birds in Greenland.
White, C.R., Boertmann, D., Grémillet, D., Butler, P.J., Green, J.A., Martin, G.R. (In press) The relationship between sea surface temperature and population change of Great Cormorants breeding near Disko Bay, Greenland. Ibis
Evolutionary Physiology 