Christina Schmuki is working on two species of beetle and two of cockroaches within our
Tumut (Buccleuch SF) experimental model. She was awarded an Australian Postgraduate Award with the Dean’s Supplementary PhD Scholarship (Faculty of Science, Technology & Engineering, La Trobe University), but transferred to Monash University when the research group moved.
As is the case for the other log-dwelling invertebrates we are studying, Schmuki sought a pair of species with different biological characteristics (in the case of these beetles, a preference for drier or wetter conditions) so that they could be expected to show different responses to habitat fragmentation:
- Apasis puncticeps Lea, which is relatively large & rare compared to the other species, and seems to prefer wetter conditions
- Adelium calosomoides Kirby, which is relatively small & common, and seems to prefer drier conditions
(
thanks to Dr Eric Matthews at the South Australian Museum for the identifications and useful information)
Schmuki showed significant impacts of forest fragmentation on population genetic patterns (and by inference, demographic / migration patterns) in the two species:
- the dry-tolerant Adelium beetle and
- the wet-preferring Apasis beetle.
The patterns of impact were different in ways that are consistent with the ecological and population genetic differences between these species.
Apasis is much less mobile (as predicted by its biology and confirmed with genetic markers) even in continuous forest, so the impacts of fragmenting its habitat have been (at least in the short term) less pronounced than the impacts on the more mobile species
Adelium.
The spatial genetic analyses in this work take advantage of both genic (population-based) and genotypic (individual-based) approaches to investigate the data from different angles.
