Survivor – On Heron Island

The dynamic duo, Carmen da Silva (from the Performance Lab) and Josh Thia (from the Riginos lab), housemates and the only members of Team Goby arrived on Heron Island located within the Southern Great Barrier Reef for a couple weeks of testing

We’re not going to lie, the weather is terrible, but were having a great time. 

Their first surprise was not a good one. Carmen, who is not known for her organizational skills thought that the food barge arrived to the island the next day (Tuesday), when it actually arrives on Thursday. All they brought to the island was a loaf of bread, some peanut butter and a 5pack of mi goreng. The first episode of survivor starts now.

They set out across the island to check out their surroundings and see if they could scrounge any food to last them a couple of days. The island, mostly made up of sand didn’t have much to offer, no coconuts no nothing. As they almost gave up hope, they stumbled across some recently hatched Green turtles! “Delicious!” Carmen thought as she was about to pounce on a hatchling, when she saw the sign for the resort restaurant in the corner of her eye… turns out they will be able to manage food wise for a couple of days. 

Green turtle hatchlings! I’m sure they were thinking “why would you lay on the only rocky part of the beach mama?!”. The birds were having a smorgasbord on the hatchlings, it was rather distressing. 

Carmen and Josh set out early the next morning to collect gobies (or snacks?) for Carmen’s thermal biology experiment. Luckily low tide coincided with basically the only non-rain period since they arrived. They caught 100 gobies within a couple of hours and got them set up in the Research Stations wet Lab. 

Collecting gobies in the intertidal zone. The old “scooperoonie” always seems to do the trick. 

Now they are letting the gobies settle into the lab conditions before experiments start and run for the rest of the Heron Island field trip.  A delightful chance to explore the island! One of the most iconic things about Heron Island is the sheer number of birds that inhabit the forest. There are over 20,000 noddies on the island which nest in the pisonia trees. The interaction between noddies and pisonia trees is an interesting one, when the pisonia trees flower they produce a sticky trap sap that entangles the birds, they become stuck and die and act as a fertilizer for the trees. A morbid but fascinating system! 

White capped Noddy

Carmen and Josh seem to have the research station to themselves, they know other researchers are visiting the island, but they are yet to spot them. Maybe Josh’s singing (practicing for Miss Saigon the musical) has scared them all away…?

Stay tuned for the next episode of Survivor here. 

Sweat’s main ingredients: sodium, chloride and potassium

"All three are carried to the surface of the skin by water within your sweat glands, and the salt stays on you after the liquid evaporates”.—Wikipedia

That is IF that liquid evaporates. But here on the land of Groote Eylandt, the researchers return after a session of trapping looking like bog monsters to varying degrees—with myself (Nat) usually the sweatiest. 

Quollity research team drenched from rains; A quick break ; Jakob extracting his first quoll

I consider it a success if I have a dry patch on my shirt by the end of my trap checking. I have just recently learned what a bunyip is in Australia, and I fear sometimes we look like that as we exit the bush with a bag of animals casually slung over our shoulder. Skye on the other hand somehow looks fresh as a daisy after a session of trapping…perhaps one day I’ll learn her secret.

Sweaty climb up Gorge; Bunyip; Skye looking great as usual

Trapping was off to a running start once they were laid in the field and we were hauling in quolls left right and center. Trapping this early in the year has already led to some new discoveries, the freshly weaned juveniles are wily and small enough to squeeze through the small gaps in some of our trap doors! After a series of mornings with empty closed traps, and the occasional poo deposited conspicuously on the trigger plate, we put 2+2 together. Some modifications with dowel and zipties shortly fixed that blunder. 

Jaime helping lay traps; Trap laying initiation for our collaboraters; Whitney the juvenile who we outwitted

A lot of blood, sweat and tears have already been poured into data collection over the last month. Cyclone Alfred put a bit of a dampener on our data collection, but we maintained productivity undercover with Clint doing some dissections, and Jakob helping me finish the waterproof (hopefully!) enclosures that my infrared camera batteries will be housed in. Skye shed some blood for the cause, with Hipster the quoll showing off his fantastic biteforce on her -- too bad that isn’t a performance measure we are collecting at the moment. Some other mild injuries included the usual bruises, scrapes, nibbles and scratches. 

Clint dissecting; Jakob siliconing; Hipster the quoll and Skye; Biteforce showcase; Wrong time and place for a thumb

Which leads me to my third component of data collection on Groote: tears—but not as you think.

One of our 5 grids is affectionately named Gorge. It is a thing of beauty. Rugged rocks, deep caverns and crevasses, quolls and rock wallabies galore, and the place of death for my field clothes. Here, two pairs of pants have already met an unfortunate end on the exact same innocuous rock, with a resounding riiiip noise shattering the silence of early dawn.  It’s a good thing Groote Eylandt has a great op-shop for I am a regular customer to replace my shredded material I used to call clothing. I seem to be the only one having wardrobe malfunctions but Jakob’s shoes are one step away from a fatal blowout so I’ll keep you posted. 

Tears of Nat’s wares; Sun’s out, guns out; Duct-tape fixes everything—for a while; Straw hats don’t last

Some highlights of the trip so far have been Bingo the 2nd year male still being alive, Clint perfecting the ZigZag performance measure looking at cornering ability, quite a few female bandicoots with 3+ young and collecting over 200 cage poos from our quolls. I hope to be looking at the hormones in this poo, so everyone has chipped in and graciously gets elbow-deep into our cages to tweeze me some fresh samples. While we are testing performance traits in the lab, the quolls also help me out by depositing some samples on the racetrack… this unfortunately does not make it into the collection vials all the time. 

Bingo the 2nd year male; Clint working out the kinks of ZigZag; baby bandicoots galore

Personality differences between the males is a major hingepoint of my PhD and how it relates to foraging, and there are already some major personalities showing for our quolls. One male in particular Rambo is a master escape artist, and a wily individual who seems to outwit all of us in the lab. I am really looking forward to seeing him and everyone else on candid infrared camera throughout the year. Lastly, Clint’s wife lovingly sent him a carepackage from America, which arrived several days after he left back to the mainland. I can confirm we have demolished the chocolate and coffee, and it’s a cointoss on which lucky individual gets to claim the new pair of boxers. Thanks Clint’s wife!

Unusable fecal sample; How racetrack running gets slippery; Clint’s care package

A successful-sweaty start to 2017

Groote Eylandt data collections has begun for 2017 for the Wilson Performance Lab.  Skye & Nat with their international collaboraters, the Danish Jakob & Georgian Clint, kick start an intense phase of collecting performance data with fellow quoll & bandicoot participants. Boss Wilson also managed to juggle a trip to the rock, injecting his joyful enthusiasm for science wherever he went! Top job guys, you are amazing!! 

Andrew & Gwen joined the busy quartet a few days back but for all things human - setting up a testing room in the community of Angurugu, meeting many more awesome people & putting out air filters for the Dust & Health study....... all the while navigating the puddles left over from the cyclone. 

It looks like a successful, albeit wet, start to the year for the Wilsonite Labbers. Stay tuned for more updates!

Adventures of the conference bonanza and ABMs in Arizona Part Deux

(by Bec Wheatley, wannabe modeller and former antechinus minion)

Few things make you feel more like a badass scientist than attending a scientific conference. Well, few things other than finally analysing a giant chunk of data and getting the kind of results you've always fantasised about .... but more on that later. At conferences, you get to hear about new research that's happening right now, inevitably learn a bunch of new things and meet some truly awesome (and potentially equally nerdy) people, and basically just revel in the total sciency-overload for a few days. Thanks to several generous grant schemes and an awesome supervisor, I was lucky enough to attend the annual Ecological Society of Australia conference in December, and the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology conference in January, where I got to present the research on predator-prey interaction simulations I'm doing with A/Prof Ted Pavlic and Dr Ofir Levy.

Sights in Fremantle, Western Australia. Western Australia was last on my checklist - I've now visited every state in Aus!

I'd been wanting to attend the ESA's annual conference since I first started my PhD, and so it was that I joyfully headed west to Fremantle with Skye, to see what's been going down in Australian ecological research. What did I discover? That exposure to (a limited number of) predators can actually help endangered animals survive in the wild, through helping them learn appropriate anti-predator responses; that heat waves can cause massive die-offs in flying foxes, and we can use biophysical models to predict when this will happen; and that integrating scientific research with indigenous biocultural knowledge is critically important to protect not only our threatened species and ecosystems, but also Australia's cultural heritage and traditions; plus so much more. The talks at ESA gave me a lot to think about and digest, and forced me reconsider a few of my own views on conservation. It’s a conference I would absolutely recommend to any Aussie ecologists, students or otherwise!

Me and Skyebo working so hard at the Indian ocean

Also, some conference advice: be friends with a wonderful postdoc who lets you crash in her fancy conference hotel room. Skye is the best!

The Mississippi, pretty street cars, and the French Quarter.

After a quick camping holiday to the South Island of New Zealand (where I had various bird-induced excitement attacks), it was off to New Orleans, Louisiana for SICB with Robbie and Chopper. New Orleans was a pretty fun location, but the conference itself was the real star (and by the way, that's how you know you're a bigger nerd than the people attending the Wizard World Comicon in the conference room next door). I discovered that elevated oceanic CO2 may compromise anti-predator responses in damselfish; that mantis shrimp use UV colour spots to size up their opponents; and that jerboas are insanely cute, and their bipedalism allows them to be extremely manoeuvrable and unpredictable, making them difficult to catch by predators (and researchers). I met some amazing scientists, and generally had the time of my life, because SICB is totally my scene in terms of research interests.

Some further conference advice: suss out whether your otherwise affable lab mate snores really loudly before you agree to let them crash in your room without buying you some ear plugs!

The somewhat overrated Bourbon Street (by day), and a totally not overrated New Orleans dessert.

Preparing for and attending scientific conferences does take time (and money), and it would be easy to just pass them up completely when you have things like, um, thesis deadlines coming up. But in my opinion, conferences are very important - they're a great opportunity to meet other researchers, to communicate your own research, and to listen to talks about studies you might not think to pick up a paper on. It's also refreshing, frequently eye-opening, and (I think) healthy to be exposed to new ideas. Plus... they're a great opportunity to travel!

A gorgeous urban sunset in Tempe, Arizona, and the (sometimes hilarious) signs you see up around my Arizona home-base, Brickyard Engineering.

A trip to the USA would obviously be wasted if I couldn't go back to Arizona State University in Tempe to get some extra modelling advice from Ted (see Part One). This time, sensitivity analyses were on the agenda - a process by which you vary your model's parameters one at a time (or sometimes even two at a time), to see how each parameter affects the model’s output. This meant integrating NetLogo (my modelling program) with R (my preferred statistical software). Luckily, someone has written a package for that called RNetLogo, and to them I am eternally grateful. Despite that, the analyses and associated coding turned out to be pretty tricky, and having a couple of weeks with Ted’s expertise on hand was seriously helpful. I'm still working through the bugs and hiccoughs that come with running my model using all possible parameter combinations (turns out I didn't have the model quite as debugged as I thought!), but I’m keeping at it - eventually, I'm certain success will be mine!

Performance in the Top End

Heat & cyclones don't stop this lab testing motor skill in small mammals & humans - 2017 data collection has begun on Groote Eylandt !

Tropical Cyclone Albert marginally missing Groote Eylandt - Feb 2017 - Both Mammal and Human Research teams survived unscathed.

Final eylandt-hop for 2016 - stumbling start, superb finish

Gwen and Chop returned to Groote mid-November for their 4th and final trip for 2016 refreshed, relaxed and ready to go after a solid stint back home…. but it wasn’t the best start to the trip. The plan for Day zero seemed simple – Step 1. Fly to Groote, Step 2. have a quick sunset beer at the Lodge, Step 3. grab a quick feed in staff quarters, Step 4. watch Socceroos play World Cup Qualifier. What could go wrong? 

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Return to Groote | a doggy-friend | back to the usual coffee stop in Umbakumba | Chop co-piloting

We got to Groote no worries, Step 1 sorted.

Gwen decided to go for a sunset walk with her doggy-friend, so Chop grabbed a beer at the Lodge and headed down to the Sunset viewing deck. He saw Jaime (ex-Wilsonite-labber) having what looks like a casual beer (Its 6pm)….with a few people he didn’t recognise. After surprising Jaime by pulling her out of her chair into a hug, he casually sat down, said hi and started enjoying his beer. After about 20 seconds he worked out he’d actually just barged into a work meeting. What followed was a super awkward 2 minutes where chop focused on the delightful sunset having an internal debate about how long he should stay there before getting up and casually leaving (picture the scene out of Ferris Buellers Day Off where Cameron’s sitting in his car ……. “He’ll keep calling me……..He’ll keep calling me”). Step 2, fail.

With his tail between legs, he headed up to the staff accom where Gwen had already found some food and was eating dinner. A quick scan of the fridge revealed the standard potato salad and sausages leftover from the buffet. Not overly inspiring. But hello….what do we have here…..some delicious looking stuffed capsicums…this is a step up. A couple of minutes later saw Chop scoffing into a couple of these things like it’s his last meal on earth. Enter one of the staff members, a lovely French girl, we had met just before we flew off the last trip. She looked at Chop eating and instantly her face took on an expression like he’d just stolen her new puppy, which was given to her for xmas, by her ageing grandmother, and sold it to a Chinese restaurant. She sheepishly let him know that she had made the stuffed capsicums specially for her boyfriend who has been working 18 hour days lately and had a late security shift that night until 4am. Step 3, fail.

All good, we can still salvage the day with some soccer. Now the Northern Territory is not big on soccer, so it gets bumped down to FOX 4 up here. We only get Fox 1, 2 and 3 in our rooms at the Lodge (tough life). Not to worry, the Socceroos games are shown on free to air, a quick Google reveals Channel 9 is showing it Live. But alas, as we checked in on arrival, we were told that everything should be ready in our rooms, but for some strange reason Channel 9….and only Channel 9 hadn’t been working lately …. “No worries, there’s nothing much to watch on that anyway is there?”  Step 4, fail…….. Ps. The Socceroos drew 2-2 against Thailand to add salt to the wound.

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Mining port from Alyangula beachfront

New things we have learned from the later half of 2016:

·       6-weeks on island is the limit

·       When a frill-necked-lizard is sunning itself on the road, it has right-of-way….even on the highway

·       Most butterflies have a longer life expectancy than a $10 Ebay coffee grinder

·       Sometimes its best for Gwen to communicate science chat to Robbie via the Chop-conduit

·       The curry cook-up is the never-ending meal, and gets better with age

·       Chop’s new sunnies with green tint were a good investement – yep, there were daily updates on how amazing they were

Manual coffee grinder v6 | curry cook-up | Chop’s morning routine | the cereal mash-up | the Lodge sunset

On a sunnier finish, the research side of things went splendidly this 5-week stint. Data collection was super successful - busy but smooth sailing all the way – and, we got to meet so many more amazing people!  A perfect trip to end the year :) 

Groote – an emotional rollercoaster

A lot has happened since the last update in June ’16 – Andrew (aka Chop) has been going modeling-mad on his PhD, Gwen had a Euro-summer break, Selena Uibo got elected as Member for Arnhem and the Dust n’ Health research team completed an epic roller-coaster of a 3rd trip.

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Alyangula sunset | modeling-madness @UQ | Swiss-ing around | Uibo campaigning | The Lodge beachfront

The August start to the 8-week stint was a jolly one, as Groote Eylandt was in a festive-mood. The annual trivia night, Picnic Day, a brightly bobbing colour run and the One People One Voice festival was a welcoming return to Groote. Spirits high, we jumped straight into dusty community liaising & all things researchy, only to land in the front seat of a ridiculous roller-coaster ride that was the 3rd Groote trip for the year. 

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Ballooning fruit @trivia night | playing up @Picnic Day | the colour run | One People One Voice @Angurugu | softball shenanigans at One People One Voice | sunset at Marble Point

The festive incline took its peak with an awesome Learning-on-Country cultural camping trip on Bickerton Island with the Milyakburra crew. Together with the Land & Sea Rangers, yellow-shirts, school principal and teacher – we spent some priceless time with the local kids making spears, walking some beautiful country & fishing. On return to Groote Eylandt we joined the Quoll team, Skye & Tom, who were in fine-form. Island life was good - the research teams were going well, there were happy yoga times, beautiful sunsets & cinema viewings in Chop’s room – until the weekend begun declining…

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Sunset fishing on Bickerton| flaming yogic-stands with Skye, Chop & Tom | sunset beauty on Groote | Tom & Chop’s cinema

Saturday night rolls around and there’s some sort of function at the Golfie (Groote Golf Club) so we all plan to head on down there. Having been invited out fishing on Bro’s boat at 5am Sunday morning, Chop’s prior knowledge of what a day on the boat with Bro means, sensibly ejected himself a bit after midnight. This however was to be Tom’s first trip out on Bro’s boat, so he kicked on. Chopper’s alarm went off at 4:45am and after banging on Tom’s door for a bit, the bushranger emerged and they headed off fishing. Tom is looking slightly underdone but also super pumped because this is his 1st trip out on a boat up on Groote. So the crew tried a few spots and were quickly hauling fish in. Tom was loving life. At about 9.30am though his hangover really kicked in. And after refusing sea sick pills, he was soon feeding the fish. This continued for 2 hours - he was absolutely hating life. With Tom indulging in a little kip as the crew drove from one spot to another, they got to the next destination and started fishing again. Tom was starting to feel a bit better and the sleep must have somehow reconnected some neurons allowing him to recall a memory from the previous night – which, upon sharing, sent Chopper and Bro rolling around on the boat giggling for the next 5 minutes (Tom’s expression a mix of bewilderment and pride).  He then went on to catch the best fish of the day, a massive Trevally. Lets just say that 24-hour-period was an emotional rollercoaster for poor old Tom, but the weekend had ended on a high.

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Bro & Chop on the boat| Tom’s first fish | Chop’s broken joy

About three weeks in, the dust & health project’s best day on record came through in the small community of Milyakburra, Bickerton Island. The cracking work-week was then brought home nicely with the weekend – a visit from Gwen’s aunty for some scenic-flying, relaxo-boating & river-adventuring. But of course, this super summit of amazing-ness wasn’t without a crash all the way down the following weekend. What started off as a much-needed peaceful trip for Chop & Gwen to the beautiful Wayne’s World camping spot, turned into a hellish hot sand 4WD gauntlet, carved by blistering hands in a dire thirst-inducing sweat-a-thon. After several hours of digging, continuous-Haviana-blowouts and Chop’s finest driving moment, the research duo finally exited the sand-dune desert.

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Andrew on Gold-winning day at Milyakburra | Gwen preparing for flight | scenic views of Groote from the sky | Wayne’s World camping spot| Haviana pluggers lasted 5 more weeks!

By the 6 week mark Umbakumba became a well-known scene for the research-duo and the daily research routine began to take its toll. The long drives, usual Friday-Umby-malaise and community happenings led to the creation of a Groote Pump Up playlist (Link to Spotify playlist ) for the journey home after difficult days. Literally living and working alongside each other in remote field research naturally means there is little solo time – which can inevitably lead to some grating moments and, let’s say, interesting communication break-throughs. Skye & Tom had flown off, and for the dusty-health-research duo the final 2 weeks played out with blunt-to-the-point communications, tense laughter and itchy feet to get off-Eylandt – but not before a visit from the boss.

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Work meetings in Umbakumba | Andrew preparing the Groote-Pump-Up playlist | cleaning dust filters| close living quarters

Robbie & Nat (new Quoll-PhD-er) arrived on Groote to two highly-strung-worn-out versions of Chop & Gwen – Eylandt fever had well and truly set in. Gwen was pleased to be relieved of deciphering Chop’s stories (which she had begun to ignore) as they were then directed towards Robbie – who suitably shares Chop’s wavelength (much to Chop’s satisfaction & relief of having to constantly explain at length to Gwen). Just in time for the weekend (and the duo’s sanity), the 4-person Wilson team headed out for a camping trip, well started to anyway – 30 minutes in, a tyre bursts nearly pushing Gwen to break her year-long-sober-thon 9 months in. Looping back to replace a crucial spare tyre, the team headed out for a 2nd time, this time successful – setting up by the beautiful shady tree at Wayne’s World. Lots of Bohnanza-bean-cards were played this camping trip, we pulled off a delicious lamb roast in the camp oven, and decided that the ability to instantly repair the roof of your mouth after burning it on hot food would be the best ‘useless’ super-power.

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Eylandt fever setting in| Tiring tyre antics | sunset camp fire | haloumi cookin’ off camp-oven heat

Gwen flew off Eylandt soon after the camping trip, putting an end to data collection for the Dust and Health Team. Oddly, Chop decided to stay on for some more punishment and help Skye and Nat with trapping for a couple of weeks. This turned out to be a poor decision. A week of hard work under Skye’s whip took its toll with a golf ball sized boil growing in Chop’s armpit. This left him bedridden for a few days and shaved about 5kg’s off his Adonis-like frame. It finally ‘drained’ a couple of days before he flew off leaving him fit to travel…..and chomping at the bit to get out of Dodge.

Sweat, Sex Ed, Spiders and Salutations – Northern quoll pre-breeding shenanigans 2016.

It’s always exciting when you first get up to the island to see how the quolls have faired in our absence, which females made it to their second or third year and how many babies survived the wet season.  This is now the 5th year of sampling the “Grids Population” – a 128-hectare area that Jaime originally set up as her PhD study population.

Rain radar week one, me hiding in a cave so the quolls would stay dry (I was already drenched) and the 8 am forecast for trapping sites on Groote.

Pre-breeding sampling of the Northern quolls on Groote Eylandt NT, started with thunderstorm after thunderstorm. This came with incessant heavy tropical rain and us getting drenched to the core most days – either from the torrential downpours or from the intense sweating due to 95% humidity - so much for only doing fieldwork during the dry season. 

Walking out of Beach Grid towards the rainbow (Grid 4) with a bag full of quolls.

First up Pippa and I were out laying the traps on Grids and starting population assessments for the pre-breeding season. Quoll numbers were looking low from the start and we got some of the smallest quolls we have ever had for this time of year (124 g female – Emily). 

The smallest quoll of the season (Emily – 124g) and the largest (Goliath – 822g). 

Waterhole – where quick post-trapping dips are had before the long sandy walk back to the Lodge.

It seems that this years lower numbers are likely due to the combination of reduced rainfall the wet season just gone and intense fires in the trapping Grids November-December last year.  So fingers crossed for a better-wet season come 2017.

Fire scared landscape on Beach Grid (Grid 4) and the second smallest female quoll Ophelia at 140g. 

Sarah trapping up to go out and lay a line on Grid 1.

After an epic fun filled week with Pippa, Sarah arrived to bring us home for the last three weeks of the season.  Although Sarah’s background is hospitality management – she excelled at rock hopping, animal handling and aiding my OCD with everything done to perfection! 

We also had a mountain of additional on island volunteers – with Nicky coming three times a week for a morning stroll through the bush (and sometimes trying to bag an empty trap), Marcelle wishing he hadn’t said he would help, as we laid 40 traps out in the blistering sun, to Jen, the new MJD researcher and Shanna, the ALC Rangers left hand woman, just coming for a jaunt to see what we are all about. It is fantastic that the local community are so interested and engaged in our research! After 5 years on island everyone knows the “Quoll Girls” and love to stop you for a quick chat about their resident quoll that most locals have in their backyard or even their homes.

On island volunteers - Nicky, Jen and Shanna out helping us capture quolls for processing.

With the “Dust and Human Health Team” needing KOB (our trusty field car) most days, the Quoll Team had to source some new wheels to move about island. So after getting on Groote Eylandt ‘Buy, Sell, Swap’ Facebook page we found ourselves with two not-so-new bicycles all for the grand old price of $40. With a little elbow grease, some bush bicycle mechanics and some hodge-podge modifications for transporting animals – we were underway to being able to move around between the field station, trapping sites and our accommodation. However, we soon realised that Alyangula is not all flat, and after morning and evening tramples through the bush trapping animals, the legs were a tad tired – with Sarah now labelling volunteering as “Skye’s boot camp”. Luckily we have use of one of the ALC Rangers’ Polaris that enabled us to hoon through the back-road dirt tracks to trapping sites when our legs just said they had had enough!

The Quoll Team’s new wheels with built-in animal carrying baskets and Sarah and I hooning around on the ALC Rangers Polaris.

From bikes to blisters - during week two I started getting a mysterious blister on my knuckle one night after laying traps all day. At first I thought typical clumsy me – must have burnt my hand and not even noticed! But as the night wore on and the pain intensified I used Dr Google to investigate what a typical spider bite can look like – because what else could it be? By the next morning my little 5 mm diameter blister had become a 10 mm one and by lunch time a 15 mm pusy blister. A trip to the Alyangula clinic and a doctor’s visit later I was on strong antibiotics and antihistamines – with the doctor confirming that good old trusty Dr Google was right– it was a spider bite.  Three days later the blister had popped and it started to heal – and two weeks since the day I only have a faint red mark. Thank goodness – I was worried for a while that I might loose my finger. Turned out Robbie thought the same – not game to Tweet the bite to the public just in case it took over my whole hand, although there were daily requests for updates so he could show all his friends in the US – What a good caring boss (as I normally never hear from him)! But no doubt it was so he could just say “Everything can kill you in Straya!” to all the United Statians.

Mysterious spider bite – 2 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, 36 hours, 3 days, and a week later.

During this field season we were fortunate enough to spend four days with Groote Eylandt school kids as part of the Learning on Country  (LoC) program.  First up we had the work experience boys from Umbakumba, Angurugu and Alyangula schools out learning how to lay trapping grids, set up camera traps and use a GPS. These skills got used the following weeks when we took them out for the real deal to lay all 40 traps for Grid 1. Come week three we had the boys helping us set up the trial camera and baited traps for Northern “Lambalk” gliders as part the new Small Mammal Project. The boys smashed through the bush, not giving a dam about the painful green-ants biting their necks and the intense heat in the middle of the day. They even got to help us process the quolls we had taken back to the ALC Rangers station to process, from data entry to collecting hair samples. Apparently they are still talking about it all!

We also got to spend a day out at Umbakumba School with the senior class in the morning and the Junior school in the afternoon. We were extremely lucky to be joined by two elder Anindilyakwa ladies, Edith and Kathy, who told stories and the history of Northern quolls (in Anindilyakwa language) for their people. The kids learnt how to trap, measure and take DNA samples from the quolls and why cane toads, cats and fire are bad for them. Then they learnt the best time to eat them from the ladies and why there are no dreamtime stories of the quolls – with even an impromptu sex ed lesson to the senior class from Edith and Kathy! Nikki (LoC coordinator), Sarah and I had no idea what was going on (as it was all spoken in language) until the class burst into laughter and then got very serious faces as Edith and Kathy bought home the important message; when animals (quolls included) have sex (guju-guju) they will get pregnant – and humans are no exception! Go ladies!

This season also entailed trialling procedures for the new Small Mammal Project (ARC Linkage with ALC) investigating the role of trace metal contamination in the ecology of native Australian mammals. We had bandicoots rip and jump through our capture bags, fall asleep in my lab while processing and some females with day old to two week old pouch young. Our glider trial, fixed open baited traps and camera traps, was of little success – but with new connections made – we have now learnt we need a water pistol armed with honey water to help entice the little critters down the tree. 

Setting up Northern glider traps with cameras and processing Northern brown bandicoots.

From teaching kids, to spider bites, to trialling new small mammal capture techniques nothing could beat the fact that Sarah and I got to give a quoll a bath! Yes a bath – suds and all! Jimmy is the resident quoll at the Groote Eylandt Lodge (our accommodation) – and the staff were concerned for him as he didn’t look the healthiest. On capture and closer inspection we soon realised poor Jimmy was in a bad state – with severely damaged ears, lack of fur on his whole underbelly and badly irritated skin. A trip to the community vet, antibiotics and steroid shot later – Sarah and I were on our way back to the lab to give a Jimmy a bath. With me holding Jimmy tightly and Sarah giving him a good belly rub, we somehow successfully cleaned up his poor belly and put some cream on his ears to stop him scratching at them – although he did somewhat resemble a drowned rat! On release we tried to give him a feed – but he would have none of it – although we did catch him in our kitchen two days later trying to eat our dinner!

Giving Jimmy a bath and post bath ointment rub prior to release – he is doing well post vet visit.

All in all the Pre-breeding fieldtrip was a great succes full of Sweat, Sex Ed, Spiders and Salutations. I kept my peace of mind with daily yoga sessions on my own private stretch of beach.

Yoga on Groote – keeping my inner balance during the intense fieldwork.

And the best of it all were the few evenings the whole UQ team took off to go camping at some of our favourite places! Marble Point and Jagged Head – with even Buddy, Gwen’s best mate coming along for the ride.  Four weeks done and dusted – now for a short hiatus back in Brisbane until my return in four weeks – with new volunteers and a renewed source of energy. What shenanigans will the Breeding Season 2016 bring?

Camping shenanigans on Groote Eylandt: Jagged Head, Wayne’s World and Marble Point. 

Pre-breeding shenanigans coming to an end – with our last camping trip to Jagged Head.

Telepathy, bike-paths, and confusions on Groote

Working in remote places requires a certain degree of patience, flexibility, ingenuity, and planning. Working closely with team-mates in remote locations makes all these qualities even more important. This is Groote Eylandt field work in a nut shell.

There's no doubt remote field work can be difficult. The idiosyncratic behaviours of others can quickly turn from a source of amusement to total frustration and bemusement. I mean - I really don't understand how the hell he can eat the same god damn breakfast everyday. What the f*** is wrong with him? But, we do our best to push aside any intolerances and work together for the common goal.

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Chopper eating breakfast

But it's not all bad. There can be amazing benefits to the long, exhausting hours working closely with others. Communication can evolve.......into something almost telepathic.  It's like you're on another plane of consciousness - you understand what your team-mate is thinking before they even think it!! The nuance of their lip curl or subtle lift of their eyebrow are all that's needed to communicate a complex idea or emotion.

The latest trip to Groote Eylandt should be no exception to the telepathic communication of remote field work in a group. After all, Chopper (a.k.a. Andrew Hunter) is a key man in the team. He's a man of eloquence, temperance, empathy, humour and good ol' fashioned manliness. He's a provider, a homemaker, a nappy changer. He has it all. So it was a real surprise then that I received an email from Gwendolyn suggesting otherwise........

Gwendolyn sent me a figure that she feels best describes the relationship between the time taken to understand an explanation by Chop versus the effort required by Chop to explain. See figure below......... It seems to show that those two working closest together (Chop and Gwen) are having the most difficulty with the communication of complex ideas and concepts.

The relationship between the time until people understand a concept versus Chopper's explanation effort this is required. Robbie, Skye and Gwendolyn's data points are provided.

It's not easy to speculate as to the root cause of this pattern. After all, Chopper's legendary explanation about the dangers of bike paths in St Lucia have changed policy and bike-path design. Is Gwendolyn unusual in her ability to not understand Chopper or is it that Robbie and Chop just share a special telepathic communication that defies explanation. Let's explore the possible explanations together......

Chopper explaining the complexities of bike path design

Possible explanations for the pattern observed above (not mutually exclusive) - feel free to suggest others I can add in:

1. Gwendolyn represents the norm of society and Chopper is just an incomprehensible blood-nut.

2. Robbie just understands the muffled garbles of a lunatic.

3. Every analogy used by Chopper somehow relates to the bike paths of St Lucia.

4. Skye represents the norm and the tails of the distribution are given by Robbie and Gwen.

5. Gwendolyn is too busy dreaming about tigers to listen to Chopper.

6. Gwendolyn believes (incorrectly) that if she stops moving and listening that he will move away and talk to someone else.

7. ?

Dogs, Dereks & Decks – a Lesson in Remote Data Collection

We, Andrew and Gwendolyn, are off and running. Traffic lights are green, and the project, looking at how dust affects the health of the Anindilyakwa people on Groote Eylandt, is underway. We have done three trips since late 2015, spending most of March, May and June on our island paradise – a welcoming breath from the hustle of Briz-Vegas. Us chumps have been on and off Groote for the past 4 years, so we settled into the pace of island life seamlessly.

Serena, Carol, Judy, and Gwen visiting Bickerton Island

Settling in to Groote Eylandt life at Little Jagged

All the community organisations have been a great help, and with their advice and keen support we met many awesome people across the Groote Eylandt Archipelago and Numbulwar. Much of these trips were spent chatting with the local Angurugu and Umbakumba mobs about the project with the help of a trusty bilingual video, ad-hoc liaisons and a box of fresh bananas from the Angurugu Market Garden (cheers Dave!). A special mention goes to Groote Eylandt Linguistics, who have been invaluable to this project, even joining us on missions to Bickerton Island. One of the biggest lessons we learned is that some of the best opportunities happen through being in the right place at the right time…. and a pinch of luck

For example, a quick 5-minute chat about a community BBQ turned into a 2.5 hour guest spot on the Umbakumba radio station with DJ_Percy. We discussed our project and managed to intertwine quoll-sexcapades with smooth Bob Marley beats. Sunset BBQs under the tamarind tree, volunteering on ghost-net boat patrols with the Land & Sea Rangers and loitering outside supermarkets were just a few random ways that led to some interesting chats and project break-throughs. Worth a mention is when we tested our basketball skills against the zippy local kids – a humbling experience where we left with our soft city feet blistered and pride dented after being dusted in the final seconds of overtime.

Collecting rogue ghost-nets with the Land & Sea Rangers

Chopper recruiting help for the BBQ

From Groote, a 20 min jump in a 6-seater plane finds you in the closest mainland community - Numbulwar. Conveniently, our long-lost UQ soccer club stalwart, Selena Uibo aka the current Labour Rep for East Arnhem, was living in Numbulwar and was the perfect host. Across a couple of trips, we saw Robbie take a few dives on the Numbulwar soccer court, met a bunch of smiling locals and we were invited to the public viewing of the men’s ceremony – an incredible experience to witness the pure joy and pride in the local culture (thank you Selena and Junga!).

Robbie fooling Chopper with his body swerve before slotting home a goal for the good guys

Selena, Andrew and Gwen at Numbulwar Jetty

After a lengthy period of serious face-time in the communities, the snowball was gathering speed – data collection had successfully begun! In libraries, community gardens, backyards, on beachside decks and occasionally in air-conditioned bliss – wherever we were invited, we went forth in the name of Anindilykwa health.

However, living in sweaty paradise was not all about work. The UQ team, including the quoll contingent, brought home the bronze medal from the Games on the Green – a fundraiser for local sport. Andrew spent every spare second out on fishing jaunts, painting his fishing lures with glittery nail polish and fantasising about his next honking fish. Gwen and her ultimate doggy-friend, Buddy, spent most afternoons walking the bush outskirts of town getting stalked by resident crocs. Skye has been working her volunteers, Pip and Sarah, to the state of exhaustion similar to that experienced by male quolls at the end of breeding (minus the satisfying ending). When Skye wasn’t head-deep in quollness she limbered up with majestic yoga moves beachside at sunset (unknowingly putting on a show for the miners having after-work beers). The weekends brought us all together for some explorative camping, reading relaxation and vigilant prairie-dog-style swimming.

Pip, Andrew, Skye and Gwen receiving the Bronze at the Games on the Green

Chopper and his beloved Queenfish

We left Groote mid-June knowing our return was imminent in a couple of months, and with a few more key lessons learned:

1. Despite a perfect record of fixing the problem, opening the driver’s side door whilst fiddling with the sun-visor actually has nothing to do with helping a temperamental starter motor tick over.

2. The Bohnanza card game is Amazebeans.

3. To effectively communicate with other humans, articulating context in random one-liner-outbursts is crucial – never assume others can read your thoughts in the 20 minutes of silence preceding said outbursts……Andrew.

4. Whilst camp dogs ain’t always the prettiest, they have a cheery disposition and happy tail that won’t quit.

5. In small communities, there is nothing surer than running into Chatty-Cathies and Doomsday-Dereks.

6. “The Wire” is in the top 5 TV shows…. ever. In the immortal words of Senator Clayton Davis…. :)

Andrew and his new camp dog companion

Our New ARC Grant on Motor Performance and Ageing

If you thought turning 30 was bad, you're not going to like this. 

We lose more than 0.5% of our muscle mass each year after 30, which decreases our ability to run, jump, swim and perform virtually any motor task. Age-related muscle loss (known as sarcopenia) increases our risk of dying due to injury and even illness, as the proteins in our muscles are a major source of fuel for our immune systems.

Elderly sea gypsy weaves nets in Phuket, Thailand

Bike riding in Sri Lanka        Photo credit: Getty Images

Luckily, there's a simple solution to the problem: getting off the couch.

Exercise improves the efficiency of muscle metabolism and makes muscles more protein-dense, which helps slow ageing. We live longer, healthier lives. 

For humans, motor ageing affects the quality and length of life. But what about animals? In nature, motor function literally means life or death, as individuals have to escape predators and catch prey to survive. They also have to find mates to reproduce. They have to run over varied terrain, in the night or day, driving rain or blazing sun, with varied body sizes and shapes. Males may have dangling testicles, females may have dangling babies. And they have to do all this while avoiding catastrophic injury. 

Last week, our research team - A/Prof Robbie Wilson, Dr Diana Fisher, Dr Hamish Campbell, Dr Celine Frere and me - got a major grant from the Australian Research Council to study a critical aspect of animal performance: how an animal's habitat affects its motor development and ageing. 

Well-endowed male antechinus

Male antechinus

What does habitat have to do with anything? We believe that within a species, individuals living in more-complex (i.e. rocky or diverse or steep) environments will have better motor function and slower motor ageing than those living in simpler (flat or unvaried) environments. This will help them live longer and produce more offspring.

Over the next 3 years, we'll be testing these ideas on small mammals - including quolls and antechinus - both in the wild and in captivity. At our field sites, we'll use GPS trackers to understand how animals use complex versus simple habitats, and how this affects their motor performance, ageing and mating. At our research facility, we'll raise animals in complex versus simple habitats to measure differences in performance, muscle physiology and mating success between environments and over lifetimes. 

Our study will show how habitat use affects motor performance and ageing in wild animals, which is key to their conservation. But more than that, we hope to shed light on a new way of thinking about motor rehabilitation. Over 50% of elderly people will experience debilitating muscle loss in their lifetimes, yet little is known about how the complexity  of movement affects muscle quality.

So this is some of what we'll be doing these next few years! If you're interested in collaborating, volunteering or learning more, please get in touch - we'd love to hear from you. (amandacniehaus@gmail.com or a.niehaus@uq.edu.au)

*This post was originally published here .

From the field: Studying endangered northern quolls on Groote Eylandt

It's a new year, which means there's new research to be done as I delve into my PhD. But before I start writing about that, I want to write about a somewhat related experience I was lucky enough to have last year.

In August/September, I got to join my labmates Ami, Jaime, and Gwen up on Groote Eylandt, which is a large island off the coast of the Northern Territory owned and run by the Anindilyakwa people. The reason: to help them out with their research on the endangered Northern Quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus).

Catwoman, a pretty little female Northern Quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus). 

A classy addition to any accessory collection. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. 

Now, if you’ve ever been to Australia, you probably have heard the story of the Cane Toad (Rhinella marina) – even if it’s just via one of the many delightful novelty souvenirs available in Australian tourist shops.

The cane toad is an extremely successful invasive species that was introduced into Australia in 1935 to eat a beetle that was negatively affecting the cane industry (which it didn’t), and since then it has spread down the East coast and across the Northern Territory, and is slowly making its way down the West coast as well. One of the reasons Groote Eylandt is so amazing is because it is one of the few areas up North that has remained cane toad-free. Because of this exclusion, it is the last stronghold population of the endangered Northern Quoll, whose numbers have been decimated via their predation on this toxic species. This makes Groote an ideal location to study the quoll in its natural habitat, as numbers are high enough for recapture studies to generate useful amounts of data.

A magical sunset in the bush next to the highway to Umbakumba.                                              Ami measuring one of our little darlings. 

I was on Groote Eylandt for 5 weeks helping Ami with data collection for her PhD project. As well as stunning landscapes and amazing native animals, Groote Eylandt is also home to a large manganese mine. All animals need some amount of manganese to function, but like any heavy metal it can be toxic in high concentrations. For her PhD, Ami is looking at how quolls from different parts of the island (that have been exposed to different amounts of manganese) perform in motor control and cognitive function tests. We are lucky enough to have access to laboratory facilities at the Anindilyakwa Land and Sea Ranger Station, where we get to work with the Rangers to figure out how to do our research in a way that is compatible with indigenous culture.

We went out every night and set 30-60 traps in one of our three trapping areas various distances from the manganese mine, which we then checked first thing the next morning. If we were lucky, we’d see white spots and hear some angry growling – otherwise it was rather likely that we’d caught one of the other marsupials that populate the area. We then transported our precious bundles back to the lab at the Anindilyakwa Ranger Station where we sexed them, weighed them, took various morphological measures and a hair sample (to get their internal manganese concentration from) and pit- and ear-tagged them.

Alfred, a feisty (and adorable) little male. 

Lastly, we’d gather information on their level of motor control. I won’t give away too many details, but we basically assessed their performance at various speeds and analysed how many mistakes they made depending on the difficulty of the task and the speed at which they performed it. We would expect that as speed and/or “difficulty” of the task increases, the quolls will make more mistakes. The reasons for this are very intuitive and you will probably have observed them in your own life; as you do things faster you have less control over your movements and are more likely to make an error. Similarly, if a task is difficult, you’re more likely to make a mistake than if it’s relatively easy. What Ami wants to know is whether the manganese concentration the quoll has been exposed to enhances this effect – i.e., whether high manganese concentrations affect motor control.

Back to the bush you go.                                                                                                                              Having a sniff out of the corner of his bag. 

Ami also wants to look at whether manganese concentration affects cognitive function in the quolls – but that’s for her to write about! She’ll continue to run these experiments for the next two years, and hopefully get some excellent results. I was very lucky to be involved in helping out with this project, as many of the techniques she used will be helpful in my own PhD.

Although quolls were the main attraction for us, Groote Eylandt has plenty of other amazing qualities that made my trip there one of the most memorable ventures into the field that I’ve ever had. We are extremely privileged to be able to conduct research there, and I learned more about indigenous culture than I ever thought I would. I also saw loads of awesome animals and plants, and got to spend a lot of time in the field – which is definitely one of the best ways to spend it.

A Mertens' Water Monitor (Varanus mertensi) chilling by Milyerrngmurramaja (the "Naked Pools"). These guys are also threatened by ingestion of the cane toads. A Striated Pardalote (Pardalotus striatus) that was nesting next to the Anindilyakwa Ranger Station.

A Burton's Legless Lizard (Lialis burtonis) we found while we were setting traps near Alyangula. A Helmeted Friarbird (Philemon buceroides) next to the highway to Umbakumba.

I’d like to say a huge thank-you to my lab for this opportunity, but most especially to Ami, Jaime and Gwen for teaching me so many new skills and being the best bush-buddies ever. I’m looking forward to future adventures with the Wilson Performance Lab as I start my PhD on another kind of carnivorous marsupial… the Yellow-footed Antechinus (Antechinus flavipes)!

Sunset on the beach at Ayangkwa ("Tasman Point"). 

All images by Rebecca Wheatley unless otherwise credited.

Performance Trade-offs

Everything about an organism's life can be looked at as a trade-off. The energy acquired from eating a banana, for example, can be used for skeletal growth or to augment fat reserves or invested in gametes; but the same energy cannot be distributed in multiple places at once. Choices - however unconscious - must be made.

Performance trade-offs occur at many different levels. At the level of the whole-animal, we know that particular types of muscles perform better for sprinting than endurance running, and that the rapid growth of tadpoles associated with certain thermal environments can affect their post-metamorphic jumping abilities. Specialised morphology that makes an animal a better fighter may also hinder its ability to escape from predators.

Performance is also strongly affected by an individual's behaviour. Time - like energy - must be allocated throughout the day, and time spent doing one activity inhibits other activities. For example, time spent hiding from predators means less time for feeding - which we know to have important carry-on effects on growth, development and motor performance. 

Trade-offs in performance even occur within cells and tissues, because the allocation of energy and the waste by-products of motor performance (e.g. lactic acid, reactive oxygen species, etc) affect other essential, non-motor systems like immunity. Currently, we're interested in how these mechanistic trade-offs facilitate variation in rapid growth, breeding and early death among populations of northern quolls.

UQ CIEF Grant awarded to the Performance Lab

- by Robbie Wilson

Last week I travelled back to Groote Eylandt to sign off on a collaborative research project with the Anindilyakwa Land Council worth $375,000 over the next two years. This supports an important project and recognizes our strengthening relationship with the people of Groote Eylandt with whom we've been working for the last five years. 

Indigenous dugong painting on Groote Eylandt

For our UQ-CIEF grant we'll be exploring the possible toxic effects of manganese from the local mining operations on the wildlife of Groote Eylandt. Groote hosts one of the world’s largest Mn mines - and despite considerable financials rewards for the local community, many locals are becoming increasingly concerned about the long-term impacts of Mn contamination for their environment. The toxic effects of Mn usually manifest in animals by affecting their cognitive and motor function, which places our research group in a unique position to tackle this research.

We'll examine the pattern of Mn accumulation in the local wildlife and then test whether any increased Mn affects motor function in our primary study animal, the northern quoll. This species offers a perfect model system because it is highly abundant across the island – both close and far from the mining operations – and we can easily adapt tests of motor control from protocols used in biomedical studies of rats and mice.

Groote Eylandt field work

Ami (PhD student) and Skye (Researcher) will be the main team members working on this project but, as always, everyone in the lab will contribute to the smooth running of the work. There is never a shortage of volunteers offering help!! We’re all excited about continuing our work with the Indigenous Rangers of Groote Eylandt and we hope they get as much out of our collaboration as we all do. My feeling is that you haven’t graduated as an Australian ecologist (or zoologist) until you’ve wandered through the bush with a real local and seen the land through their eyes. 

Thanks again to the Anindilyakwan people for their on-going trust and acceptance of our research team. We look forward to the season ahead.

Robbie 

I spent a late afternoon wandering rocky landscapes and avoiding crocodiles

In Search of Hot Mosquitofish

How do animals adapt to hot temperatures? What allows some animals to do well in hot conditions while others simply, well – die?

A natural thermal gradient - the hot bores of outback Queensland

Seems like a pertinent question when one considers the world is getting hotter. And quickly.

My current ARC Discovery Project poses these very questions. I want to understand the mechanisms of adaptation to warmer temperatures and how this can shape a species' population dynamics and survival. It's not surprising then that my interest was piqued by rumours of an introduced species of freshwater fish (the ubiquitous mosquitofish) that can actually survive in the bath-hot bore drains of western Queensland.

Across the state's west, numerous deep bores tap into the rich underground water sources of the Great Artesian Basin. Water spews out of these pipes from depths of more than 1500m at temperatures in excess of 70°C, flowing into narrow drains and cooling – allowing livestock to persist in an environment that would be otherwise uninhabitable. Fish (well, so the rumours go) inhabit these open drains at year-round temperatures above 30°C and sometimes even greater than 40°C. The possibility of capturing and studying these fish was too tempting to ignore.

RA Skye Cameron + echidna

My RA and lab organising force Skye is used to my crazy, impetuous ideas, and she doesn't even seem surprised when my ideas are offered at stupidly short notice and without any respect for logistics. In this specific case, Skye laughed – and started packing – when I suggested we should head out west in search of some hot fish in just a few days’ time.

We would collect some fish from hot bores to study in the lab.

It was the prospect of teaming-up with some UQ colleagues that work out near Barcaldine (1200 km north-west of Brisbane) who know the local people, properties and bore-drain locations that lit a fire under my b-hind.

So - it was early on a Monday morning that Skye picked me up half-asleep (me, not her) and we set-off on our adventure with no guarantees of success (let's face it, little chance of success). By lunchtime on Tuesday we reached Barcaldine. We'd avoided suicidal kangaroos and emus playing chicken with every vehicle pelting along the highway, and we rendezvoused with Jeremy (RA) and Billie (Honours) – from my colleague Rod Fensham's lab group – at the local bakery. Incidentally, Rod and Jeremy work on the spring systems of Edgbaston - the site of Australia's most endangered freshwater fish, the red-finned blue-eye (more on this another time).

we had to stop driving at dusk as the emus and kangaroos made the roads dangerous

After the obligatory orientation tour of the town's pubs on Tuesday evening and a sampling (2 kgs) of the local beef (not by Skye), we set off in search of bores on Wednesday morning. It didn't take long before we found them.

The first property we visited had a bore flowing out at 55°C into a tiny, narrow drain. Over the course of 30 m, the water cooled down to temperatures of around 45°C, and as we walked along the drain we spotted our first hot candidates.

Little juvenile mosquito fish living at 42.8°C.

Holy be-jesus!! This temperature is higher than I thought possible for any mosquito fish to survive in.

It was incredible - fish living in water I found hot to the touch.

mosquitofish were found at temperatures as (naturally) hot as 42.8 degC

Walking along the drain revealed a beautiful temperature gradient that dropped down by around 1°C every 5 meters.

When we hit temperatures of around 35°C there was an absolute explosion of fish and the surface rippled with movement.

We'd found our hot fish – and in truly staggering numbers. The air temperature was just a little over 20°C – and it was dropping nightly to below 5°C – yet the fish were enjoying balmy water. These fish had found their stable, warm conditions and were clearly loving it.

kangaroos - as far as the eye could see

By the end of the next day, we'd collected mosquitofish from two more sites and were ready to head back to Brisbane with a troop-carrier full of bore water and thermophilic fish. All we had to do was avoid those roos and make it back for my daughter Nelle's birthday party by 11am Saturday (Happy Birthday Princess).

And we did. I was only 30 minutes late to the party …

Robbie

The Grand Slam: How Hard Should You Hit?

Squirrels know what’s going down (or do they)? Image source: Wikimedia commons.

The trade-off between performance and accuracy is a problem faced by a lot of different animals in a variety of situations. For example, consider a squirrel running along a bare branch to get from one tree to another; the faster it runs, the less time it spends exposed to predators. However, as the squirrel runs faster, it also increases its chances of mis-stepping and falling to its potential doom. 

So, to get the best of both worlds, the squirrel needs to optimise its running speed depending on its chance of slipping (the width of the branch) and the cost of falling off (the height from the ground).

These sort of performance/accuracy trade-offs are also commonplace in the human world. How fast should you smash out a text message to your supervisor asking him (politely) to email back your latest draft before the number of typos makes the whole thing unintelligible?  In particular, these trade-offs are of a great deal of interest in elite sports. An awesome example of a sport where this trade-off is of utmost importance is in singles tennis.

Serving hard: Heather Watson, Roger Federer and David Ferrer. Image source: Wikimedia commons.

In tennis, it’s pretty well accepted that if you serve really hard, it’s more difficult for your opponent to return the ball. But the harder you serve, the more likely it is that you’ll miss the service area and fault. So, players will usually belt it out on their first serve, but if they miss the first serve they’ll hedge their bets and serve softer the second time round to make sure they don’t double fault.

A/Prof Robbie Wilson, Dr Chris Brown and I have been testing this idea about performance trade-offs and optimal strategies using data from the men’s singles in the 2013 Australian Open. We’ve found this observation to be generally true: the probability of winning the point increases as the serve speed approaches its maximum, but the probability of faulting increases as well (for most players – some players are really consistent at getting it in regardless of how fast they serve). This was reflected in the frequency of high serve speeds in the first and second serves.

Jérémy Chardy, Andy Murray and Janko Tipsarevic. Image source: Wikimedia commons.

We’ve also constructed an optimality model which predicts the optimal serve speed taking into account the probability of faulting and the cost of a fault. An optimality model is, in essence, a mathematical model where you input the risks and rewards of a specific situation for a given individual, and it will tell you the optimal response for that individual if it wants to both minimise the risks and maximise the rewards. 

Optimality modelling is useful because it allows us to calculate the optimal response of specific individuals to any situation. We are looking at whether their opponent’s world ranking (ability to return a fast serve) and the point they’re going for or defending against (normal, game, set or match) affects their serve speed in relation to their optimum, but more on those results later.

Rafael Nadal, Caroline Wozniacki and Jérémy Chardy. Image source: Wikimedia commons.

We hope that our research can teach us more about how animals optimise their behaviour and physical efforts to improve their chances of successfully performing a given task. Depending on what we find, we might even be able to offer specific recommendations to tennis players wanting to improve their service game – who knows what the future might hold!

Andrew Hunter, a PhD student in our lab, is looking at performance/accuracy trade-offs in soccer. Will the results be similar between an individual and a team sport? We don’t know yet, but it will be interesting to find out.

Novak Djokovic, Agnieszka Radwańska and Venus Williams. Image source: Wikimedia commons.

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Can water dragons actually run on water?

Today's guest poster is Dr Christofer Clemente. After postdoctoral stints at Cambridge and Harvard, Chris obtained an ARC DECRA and joined the Wilson lab at UQ. You can keep up with Chris's adventures on his science blog, Biomechanics Downunder.

I have long been impressed with the ability of the South American Basilisk lizard to run on water. There are plenty of videos of it on youtube, that show 2 important aspects of its locomotion: 

1. it's able to lift the whole body out of the water, and 
2. it's able to do so for quite long distances (around 10-15m). 

Some lizards' ability to run on water has been documented quite well by a series of papers by a group at Harvard University, particularly Tonia Hsieh. They've done some great work, including describing how smaller lizards are better able to support their body weight than are larger lizards, modelling 3D forces andrecording 3D kinematics of the lizards' stride. Below is a gif showing some of the detailed kinematics of the lizard stride from George Lauders lab webpage. 

(NOTE: just click on the gifs if they are not running)

One other important point reported in these papers, based on the description given in Hsieh (2003), is it seems the lizards' kinematics change when running on water, such that the limb moves behind the hip, rather than being both in front and behind the hip.   

This is shown quite well in the gif above. So given this information on how Basilisk runs on water, we can then ask the question, Can the water dragon (Intellagama lesueurii) also run on water?

I was led to believe it may be able to from two dominate and convincing lines of logic. 

1. they are water dragons! - it might behoove them to be able to do so and 
2. I heard reports of the juvenile lizard being observed doing so from a fellow researcher. 

So I modified the lizard racetrack which I have here at the University of Queensland, by placing a short, water-filled aquarium across the water dragons' path which they must cross to get to the other side. Then I sat back and filmed them using the fastec high speed camera system. And this is a typical (read: absolutely best) result below

Well the first thing I noticed is that they are no basilisk lizards. The body is not held out of the water and progress is significantly slowed. The first step seems hardly effective at all, and the second step is much deeper, and seems like a breaking step, with the foot held flat. However, the following step seem to have some similarity to those of the basilisk. From steps 3 onwards, the foot does not appear to be pushed as far forward, and much of the stroke seems to be posterior of the hip, as in basilisk. Secondly the trapped air bubbles on the foot are interesting, and these are also observed for basilisk, where they are thought to be the result of tiny fringes along the toes of the south american lizard. Such fringes however, are not obvious in the water dragons. Below is a snapshot of the bubble being dragged down on the trailing edge of the foot. 

So I'm unsure what to make of this all. It does look like they are capable of some run/swim locomotion, but it certainly falls short of the amazing prowess of the basilisk.

Here are some less impressive runs. Though notice that the right hind foot is actually brought out of the water - suggesting they could be using surface effects to give more downward force. 

And this one below shows a similar stroke. 

So that's as far as I've got. Let me know whether you think it is sufficiently interesting to warrant detailed kinematic analysis, or whether you think water dragons are just a little impaired when it comes to running on water. 

Finally, I leave you with what happens after several trials and the dragons know the water is coming up. It led me to believe, that for water dragons, they sure do not like water! 

The boldest gecko: personality in a reptile

Today on the blog we're happy to have former Wilson Honour's student, Rebecca Wheatley, who describes her thesis work on gecko personality. Rebecca's currently working as a research associate in the Wilson lab, and plans to start a PhD next year. You can find out more about Rebecca on her science blog, The Adventures of the Integrative Ecologist.

Animal behaviour is a big field - and it's constantly expanding as research reveals gaps in our understanding of why animals do the things they do. One topic in animal behaviour that holds a great deal of interest for me is that of animal personality. This is a relatively new concept and, frankly, it's a little bit controversial. 

The word "personality" conjures up a variety of mental images, most of which pertain to one animal in particular: us. It goes without saying that people have different personalities; we experience it every day. But do other animals have personalities as well?

Image: Great tit (Parus major), beadlet sea anemone (Actinia equina) and pumpkinseed sunfish (Lepomis gibbosus); three species that display animal personality, from very different groups. Image source: Wikimedia commons.

In animal behaviour, the term "personality" is defined as consistent differences in behaviour displayed by individuals. An example of a personality trait is how an individual responds to a threatening situation, termed boldness or shyness. Bold individuals are undaunted by threatening situations and will approach the stimulus, while shy individuals will stay away or hide.

There are heaps of different personality traits that have been studied, including boldness, exploratory behaviour and aggression, amongst many others. Individuals' "personalities" are thought to range along a proactive-reactive continuum, where proactive individuals are aggressive and bold while reactive individuals are more passive and shy (sound familiar? It's not unlike a simplified version of the extroverted/introverted behaviour displayed by people).

There's growing evidence that "personality" is present within many groups of animals. Despite this, we don't really know much about what determines an animal's place along the proactive-reactive continuum or why this variation exists.

Image: My study species: the Asian house gecko (Hemidactylus frenatus). Image credit: Wikimedia Commons (1 & 3) and Rebecca Wheatley (2).

During my honours project, I investigated"personality" in male Asian house geckos (Hemidactylus frenatus). I measured the anti-predator behaviour (a proxy for boldness) of 100 geckos by filming each gecko for one hour and then by calculating the proportion of time it spent inside the shelter in its terraruim. 

Each gecko was measured under three different treatments:

1. "empty terrarium": where nothing (aside from the shelter) was added to the terrarium, to give me a measure of each gecko’s normal amount of anti-predator behaviour
2. "terrarium with novel object": where I added a novel object to the terrarium, to see what happened to their anti-predator behaviour when something new was added to the environment
3. "terrarium with threatening stimulus": where I added a threatening stimulus, to see how their anti-predator behaviour changed when something scary was added to their environment

I found that different individuals reacted to the treatments in different ways, but the overall trend looked like this:

We can see that when a novel object was added to the environment, the geckos' anti-predator behaviour generally decreased when compared to their standard level of anti-predator behaviour. This might be because they wanted to check out the new object to make sure it wasn't food or some other valuable resource. 

However, when I added a threatening stimulus, their anti-predator behaviour jumped back up again to around the same as its standard level. 

So it seems that the threatening stimulus effectively cancelled out the novel object effect.

How do we know if these behaviours constitute as "personality"?

Well, I found that while different individuals displayed consistent anti-predator behaviour within treatments, they also responded to the treatments in different ways. Some displayed more anti-predator behaviour when the environment was altered (were "shyer"), while others displayed less (were "bolder"). 

Therefore, from our definition, we can see that their anti-predator behaviour is a personality trait: they display consistent differences in behaviour that are context-specific.

Checking on my gecko housing set-up. Image credit: Amanda Niehaus.

But why do individuals have different personalities?

Previous research has found that a few things can be associated with an animals' boldness or shyness. A large body mass is often associated with a bold personality, which is probably because heavier individuals are usually larger and more likely to win in a fight (so they have a good reason to be bold). Similarly, individuals with a hard bite force, a strong claw pinch or any other performance trait which would give them an advantage in a contest are usually bolder as well. 

The possession of traits that might make it easier for them to escape from a predator in a pinch, like fast running speed, have also been associated with boldness.

 In addition, resting (or "standard" for reptiles) metabolic rate has been linked to animal personality; it's thought that bolder, more aggressive individuals need a higher metabolic rate to keep up with their energetic demands.

I investigated how some of these traits interact to effect boldness in my geckos. I measured each gecko's mass, standard metabolic rate, maximum running speed and maximum bite force and analysed their interactive effects on anti-predator behaviour. Contrary to what I expected (and to what the literature would lead us to predict), I found that none of these traits affected anti-predator behaviour. This could be due to a few different things: one possibility is that boldness and shyness in Asian house geckos has a hormonal basis. It could also be that "personality" in geckos develops based on experiences rather than any specific physiological or performance trait. To discover the answer to this question, further research into the interactive effects of such traits on personality needs to be done.

One of my geckos in his metabolic chamber. I did all my metabolic tests during the day (when they are least active, being nocturnal animals) so I could get an accurate estimate of their resting (standard) metabolic rate. Image credit: Amanda Niehaus.

Anyway, why does it all matter – why does "personality" even exist?

The fact is there are costs and benefits to being both proactive and reactive. Proactive individuals are bolder and more aggressive, so they are usually better at holding territories and getting laid – but they're also a lot more conspicuous to predators, so they tend to "live hard, die young". Reactive individuals, on the other hand, might not have the best real estate or as many mates at any given time, but their shy behaviour means they usually live longer. So, if we imagine an ecosystem where predation is low, it's better to be proactive and reap the benefits without the risk of being eaten. But if the ecosystem changes (for example, a bunch of predators move into the neighbourhood) and all the proactive guys die off – who is left? This is the most popular theory as to why different personalities exist; so that if conditions change quickly, some individuals survive and the population continues.

Although extremely interesting, these personality experiments were only one small aspect of my honours project, which aimed to answer questions about fighting ability (resource-holding potential) and fighting strategies. More on that later!

- by Rebecca Wheatley

Bit of a teaser for the rest of my project. Image credit: Amanda Niehaus.

What Determines Gecko Fighting Performance | An Honours Project by Rebecca Wheatley

This is Rebecca. She just submitted her Honours thesis, and is probably chilling with a vodka lemonade on a beach somewhere. Or else she's wishing she was.

A couple months ago, I asked Bec to describe her thesis - and to show me the experiments she had running. Here's what she said:

My research is using Asian house geckos as a model to answer questions about how morphology, performance, metabolic rate and personality interact to affect fighting ability in animals.

Rebecca's work is exciting because few studies have evaluated how morphology (or body size | shape), physiology, and personality work together to determine animal performance.

And can animals really have personalities? Of course, but not like you and I do. In the non-human world, personality can refer to repeatable differences in behaviour among individuals. For example, some individuals consistently tend to be shy, and others tend to be bold. Boldness | shyness is important for animals, as it can determine the likelihood of obtaining food or mates, or getting captured by predators.

When I caught up with Rebecca, she was measuring geckos' metabolism in purpose-designed jars, which were hooked up to specialised equipment that measures oxygen consumption. Oxygen consumption is one way that scientists assess metabolic rate in animals in the lab.

Collecting data on gecko metabolism

Rebecca was also video recording interactions between randomised pairs of geckos. Asian house geckos are aggressive little lizards, and will sort out dominance via displays of their open mouths, biting, and | or chasing. In her thesis, Rebecca looked at which animals were likely to be dominant, and whether that depended on their metabolism, morphology, and | or personality. 

collecting data on gecko fighting

And what did she find? The oversimplified version is that bite force, body mass, and running speed were most important in determining gecko dominance. Big, fast, hard-biting geckos were likely to be winners. The surprising thing was that metabolism and boldness didn't seem related to fighting performance.

There's a lot more to Rebecca's research: she used all the information she collected on morphology | physiology | behaviour to test important ecological theories about how individuals should interact (known as game theories). But we'll talk more about that another time - we don't want to give away everything just yet.

Thank you Rebecca, for taking the time to share your honours work with us, and for being such a wonderful labmate!

written and photographed by Amanda Niehaus, PhD

Welcome to Our Newest PhD Students

The lab is getting bigger! Andrew Hunter {Chopper} and Ami Fadhillah Amir have just joined the lab to do their PhDs - Chopper on performance and Ami on conservation. Ami acquired a prestigious Malaysian scholarship for her work, so we don't know for sure if the following is applicable for her ... but for Chopper, at least, post-doc Sean Fitzgibbon put together a financial plan for his upcoming years of servitude: "Chop, I have just looked at the conditions of your award and spoken with your accountant. We offer the following:

Stipend $23,728 per annum (Tax-free) = $461/wk

Committed expenditure:

Mortgage $380/wk remainder $81

Utilities $28/wk remainder $53

Football subs $17/wk remainder $36

Groceries $23/wk remainder $13

Home brew $8/wk remainder $5

We suggest that you set-up a trust savings account to invest your weekly surplus income of $5. Based on my calculations, after your PhD you should be able to live off your savings (and interest - based conservatively on 6.2%) for approx. 2.1 days. This should really take the heat off when you are searching for a job post-hand-in

Welcome to the familia! Let me know if we can be of further assistance*." - S.F.

*this post is not meant to replace real financial planning and new PhD students should always consult a bona fide accountant for advice on saving vs. spending their income. If they can afford one.