In the next series of posts, I'm going to highlight some of the research projects that we're undertaking in our group. In each post, I'll focus on one area of our research and give you some of the basics about the project. In the future, we'll follow these short segments up with more detail - as we go back into the field or publish papers or analyse some of our data.
You'll be able to find the full list of our current research projects in the Research Projects page.
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| Where we work ... when we're out of the office, that is |
Ok, so it's not all tropical islands ... but there are some interesting questions to be answered on St Bees Island (shown above). We also study koalas in southeast Queensland - the Brisbane metro area and its surrounds.
Let's have a closer look at some of our current projects.
1. Koala-speak
Why is it important to understand what koalas say? Because communication is very important to the ecology of animals. Calls can be used to advertise fertility to members of the opposite sex, guard territories, or maintain contact with offspring. Koalas make grunting sounds as well as loud, deep calls called bellows - and part of our research is trying to discern what these sounds mean.
... and we're asking:
How does bellowing correlate with movement patterns of males and females? Is bellowing by males related to the fertility (estrus cycle) of nearby females? What do female or male koalas respond to in other individuals' calls? How does the background noise in urban environments affect koala calling - and thus, reproduction?
... how do we do it?
For this project, we have a really novel set-up on St Bee's Island (off the central coast of Queensland). We've stationed a number of solar-powered mobile phones around the island, which record and upload all the sounds in their proximity for 2 minutes every 30 minutes. The data is sent back from the phones via Telstra’s Next G network, so we get the data within minutes of it being recorded. We're doing this work in collaboration with some very technology-savvy researchers at QUT's Microsoft e-Research Centre.
Using the data we get from the mobile phones, we correlate calling on St Bees with a number of environmental variables, collected via weather stations. And many of the individual koalas on the island are tagged with GPS collars, allowing us to see where they are at any given time or where they might move in response to calling in a particular area.
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| One of our tracking collars, ready for deployment on a koala |
Written by Amanda Niehaus, PhD on behalf of the Koala Ecology Group
