The ABC has just run a story on the role of bird and hymenopteran vision in the evolution of floral colouration. Read about our research, carried out in collaboration with colleagues here at Monash and RMIT, here.
Townsville fieldtrip
Members of the Wong lab went up to Townsville to collect guppies from Alligator Creek for a longitudinal experiment funded by a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research council.
American visitor
For the past several weeks, our Group has been hosting Amelia Munson (bottom right), a PhD student from Prof Andy Sih’s Group at UC Davis. Ameila has been studying the effects of a novel predator on the behaviour of feral red devil cichlids. Her visit to Australia has been funded by a prestigious East Asia Pacific Science Institute fellowship in partnership with the National Science Foundation (US) and The Australian Academy of Sciences. Today we had a lovely farewell lunch for Amelia at a spicy Korean restaurant.
Swedish summer!
As part of an ongoing collaboration between our research group and Tomas Brodin’s team at Umeå University, Minna Saaristo and Michael Bertram are currently working in Sweden investigating the impacts of pharmaceutical pollution on anxiety behaviour in European perch. While abroad, Michael has also presented a talk at the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) conference in Nantes and will present at the upcoming International Society for Behavioral Ecology (ISBE) conference in Exeter. In their spare time, Michael and Tomas have been out banding birds!
Another PhD completion
Congratulations to Nick Moran who submitted his thesis today.
Radio Marinara
Click here to listen to Bob’s interview about the sex lives of squid on Radio Marinara.
Males unfazed by costly sex
Sex is costly. It can be time consuming, energetically demanding, and resource depleting. So, it makes sense to choose your mates wisely. Being choosy, however, might not always be for the best, at least not when it comes to sperm allocation in male bottletail squid. New research led by former Honours student Amy Hooper set out to investigate how male squid might allocate sperm to higher quality females after they’ve already mated. Despite being heavily sperm depleted, males were just as eager to mate with any female presented to him, even if she was of much lower quality. The results suggest that even when mating is very costly, social environment may be more important in determining mating strategy. The work was published in Animal Behaviour.
For an example of the press coverage, click here.
