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!
Research conducted in the White lab was presented in 5 talks and 4 posters at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Main Meeting in Prague. The meeting was attended by Craig White, Philip Matthews, and Natalie Schimpf.
Evolutionary Physiology 