Death After Sex in the Australian Bush

Charleston wasn't just about pizza and beer, though with any scientific conference that's always a part of it ...

First up, we'll hear about Jaime's poster. Jaime did a 1st class honours degree in the lab, studying the way Rhinella marinus (cane toad) tadpoles respond to the presence of predators in their environment. But that's not what she was presenting here ... Jaime also recently was accepted into the PhD program at UQ to study quolls on Groote Eylandt, and she was keen to get the word out there about her new study system.

Now. More about quolls and sex and the bush, as conveyed by Jaime and her co-authors on the talk, Robbie and Billy {with clarifications from me along the way}

Koala Ecology Now Has a Quoll Page!

We now have a page devoted to our research on the Northern Quoll - check it out here.

Want to Learn More About Koalas? Start with the Science.

I know there are lots of you out there happy to get whatever information you need about koalas from wikipedia. You know what's even better? Reading the real science. 

I've just updated our koala (and other wildlife) publication page, so head over there for links to our relevant publications over the last 10 years or so.

Koala Calls Accurately Reveal Male Size

Koalas aren’t the most social of animals: they move mostly at night, live mostly-independent lives, and don’t group together or socialize, except when they’re planning to mate. So how do they find each other when they need to? Male koalas use deep resonating calls, or bellows, to send messages across the dense eucalyptus forest about where they are – but new research by Dr Benjamin Charlton (University of Vienna) and collaborators in Brisbane, Australia, shows these calls also relay important information about the caller’s size. Their work was published this week in the international peer-reviewed journal The Journal of Experimental Biology (doi:10.1242/jeb.061358).

When it comes to koala mating and territory defense, size matters.

Koalas in New Scientist

Our koala work was recently featured in the fabulous popular science magazine, New Scientist. With, I might add - a really cool picture!

This photo is from the New Scientist article, which you can access here

Click here for the link!

Quoll Conservation on Groote Eylandt

Recently, our conservation researchers have begun a collaboration with the Anindilyakwa Land Council of Groote Eylandt - a large island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, off the northern coast of Northern Territory.

Bill wrote a great article about the collaboration on the San Diego Zoo blog - which you can

Featured in (the journal of) Behavioural Ecology!

We recently got word that our study on koala communication will be published in the widely-acclaimed journal Behavioral Ecology. Great news! Here's a copy of the abstract (or summary) for the paper, written by W Ellis, F Bercovitch, S FitzGibbon, P Roe, J Wimmer, A Melzer, and R Wilson.

(names in bold are part of our Koala Ecology Group at UQ)

Bill in the field. Photo by Malcolm Ludgate

ABSTRACT (a summary of our study)

Acoustic communication mediates sociality in a variety of animals. One of the more ubiquitous vocal signals to have evolved is the sexual advertisement

Koala Home Ranges

In the last post, we talked a bit about what home ranges are ... now it's time to see what the home ranges of urban koalas look like!

The home range of one (female) koala.
Note there's a road between the 2 areas she inhabits!

As part of her honours research, Ami tracked the home ranges of 6 koalas here in Brisbane. She can use this data to extrapolate to the wider koala population - her study basically

Koalas in Housing Developments - The Pilot Study

We've been working on the ecology of koalas in urban environments for a number of years - but we wanted to share with you some of the data we got in a pilot study a few years ago. It told us a lot about how urban koalas make

Tracking Koalas

As part of her honours thesis, Ami used GPS collars to track the movements of koalas around urban areas. In case you're curious, this is the same kind of technology that gets us from Point A to B using sat-nav ... but in this case, a transmitter resides in a small collar the koala wears.

It gives researchers (like Ami) regular updates on the whereabouts of the individual wearing the collar.

Check out how the data can be put together:

This map is one that Ami

A Little Bit About What We Do ... Part 1 - Koala Speak

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.