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Honours supervisors and projects 2008
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Evolutionary Ecology
Office: G17 Biology Building (#17)
Telephone: 9905 5667
Email: martin.burd@sci.monash.edu.au
Evolutionary ecology is the study of the ecological basis of adaptation in organisms. In our lab, we investigate life-history evolution, behaviour, and reproduction in a variety of plants and animals. Honours students have made an important contribution to our research effort, and several papers based on honours projects in the Evolutionary Ecology Lab have been published in scientific journals. [More research information]
Two honours research projects available in 2007 are described below. Students interested in these projects should contact me as early as possible in Semester 2, 2006. Prospective honours students from outside Monash University are also welcome to enquire about the projects below, or about honours applications in the School of Biological Sciences in general.
In many animal species with parental care, juvenile siblings compete—and sometimes fight to the death—in order to gain the largest possible share of parental feeding. Doug Mock, an ornithologist at the University of Oklahoma, noted that great egret parents fed their nestlings small fishes, and that the dominant nestlings ferociously attacked their smaller siblings to obtain this food. In contrast, nestlings of the great blue heron, a closely related species, were fed large fishes by their parents and displayed little intra-brood aggression. Mock proposed (Science 225:731–733, 1985) that prey size determines whether parental feeding can be monopolized, which in turn affects the intensity of sibling competition.
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A recent honours student in our lab, Laura Bateson, participated in a novel experimental test of Mock's Prey-Size Hypothesis: she measured the effect of prey size on intra-brood disparity in growth and survival in a brood-tending leech, Helobdella papillornata. This native Australian annelid preys on small snails, and parents hunt these prey items and provide them to their offspring for several weeks after hatching. Laura found that broods provided with small snails had higher mortality and greater inequality in body size than broods fed large snails, even though the rate of provisioning was controlled so that all broods received the same total amount of food. This interesting result is consistent with the Prey-Size Hypothesis, the first demonstration of this effect outside the birds. It will be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, later in 2006.
Although this work shows that prey size has an effect on the outcome of parental care, we now need to confirm that competition and unequal distribution of the parental food offerings really are the mechanisms behind Laura's findings. An honours student in 2007 can use imaging techniques to measure the amount of food present in the guts of individual juveniles following feeding bouts on prey of different sizes, and from this information determine whether food is shared equally among all siblings, or monopolized by a few. This will be a lab-based project at Clayton campus.
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Stylidium graminifolium in a common winter- and spring-flowering plant in Victoria with an unusual pollination mechanism. The anthers and style are fused to form a bent trigger that is 'cocked' to one side of the flower by turgor pressure in cells at the base of the trigger. When pollinators land and disturb small filaments at the center of the flower, the trigger is released and recoils suddenly to strike the pollinator on the back. This either deposits pollen on the pollinator (if the anthers are dispensing pollen), or picks up pollen from the pollinator (if the stigma is exposed and receptive).
An important factor in the reproductive ecology of flowering plants with hermaphroditic flowers is whether a flower's male function (pollen donation) and female function (pollen receipt) benefit equally from repeated pollinator visits. In trigger plants, this would depend on how many times the trigger mechanism can work (does it wear out with repeater use?), and what the average pollen transfer per 'strike' is. A student working on this project will measure these, and other reproductive features, in trigger plants in field populations located on the outskirts of Melbourne. Frequent travel to field sites will be necessary during October 2007 to January 2008.
Recent publications by honours students in the Evolutionary Ecology lab:
Cooper, K., M. Burd, and K.S. Lefevere. 2002. Correlated response of autogeny to selection on adult starvation resistance in the blowfly, Lucilia cuprina. Heredity 88:35-38.
Tan, G. N., F. R. Govedich, and M. Burd. 2004. Social group size, potential sperm competition and reproductive investment in a hermaphroditic leech, Helobdella papillornata (Euhirudinea: Glossiphoniidae). Journal of Evolutionary Biology 17:574-580.
Paez, D., F. R. Govedich, B. A. Bain, M. Kellett, and M. Burd. 2004. Effects of parental care on hunting behaviour of Helobdella papillornata (Euhirudinea: Glossiphoniidae). Hydrobiologia 519:185–188.
Baker, A. M., M. Burd, and K. M. Climie. 2005. Flowering phenology and sexual allocation in single-mutant lineages of Arabidopsis thaliana. Evolution 59:970–978.
Burd, M., F. R. Govedich, and L. Bateson. 2006. Sibling competition in a brood-tending leech. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B (in press)
