If your interests coincide with mine, come and have a chat. I am more than happy to talk about possible honours and PhD projects with interested students. I am also happy to co-supervise students who are interested in multi-disciplinary projects in ecology and evolution.
Below are a few Honours projects that I am offering in the field of Evolutionary Biology. They focus on understanding how organisms adapt to changing environmental conditions, and how best to manage populations of threatened species. I am also happy to explore other potential projects with interested students.
Project 1 Species’ borders: limits to evolution at range margins
Most species have very restricted distributions and occupy a limited set of ecological niches. What stops species expanding beyond their current range? The simple answer is that populations have negative growth rates and cannot become established beyond their current range. However there is abundant evidence for adaptation to different environments within the range of a species. What is happening at range edges to limit adaptation and prevent range expansion? The answer to this question will determine our ability to predict and manage species’ responses to climate change, habitat loss and fragmentation. This honours project will examine the extent to which life history trade-offs limit evolution at range margins. Specifically, it will ask whether trade-offs between fecundity and thermal tolerance might account for species distributional limits.
Project 2 (joint supervision with Dr Damian Dowling): Conservation biology – is there an optimal level of outbreeding?
We know a great deal about the nasty consequences that stem from inbreeding. It might seem strange, but counter to this we actually know very little about the consequences (be they good or bad) of outbreeding with very distantly related mates. In theory, mating with individuals from distant populations can actually result in a breakdown in fitness that we call outbreeding depression, if it results in the break-up of locally adapted gene complexes that have been coevolving over long periods of time. When it comes to research on animals, studies that have examined the question of whether there is an optimal level of inbreeding / outbreeding have typically employed flawed experimental designs that are unlikely to uncover evidence for outbreeding depression even when it occurs in nature. The honours student will redress this problem using a solid experimental design. This research has obvious implications for conservation management, such as the question of how to manage captive breeding populations in the long term.
Project 3 (joint supervision with Dr Damian Dowling): Adaptation to climatic stress: is thermal adaptation limited by a trade-off between heat and cold tolerance?
Climate change is thought to be the biggest threat to the long-term future of almost every species. This is because temperature, and in particular temperature stress, is a key determinant of species distributions and abundances. Understanding if and how a species will adapt to temperature extremes is crucially important in allowing us to assess the likely threats imposed by climate change. One way to study climatic adaptation is to study populations collected from along latitudinal clines. This is because latitude can be thought of as a surrogate for climate; as latitude changes, so do climatic variables like temperature and humidity. Repeated clines in different geographic regions or in related taxa strongly implicate the occurrence of adaptation under natural (climatic) selection. Levels of thermal tolerance have been shown to vary with latitude in many species; tropical populations have higher heat tolerance but lower cold tolerance than their temperate counterparts. In this project, the Honours student will merge conservation biology with classic predictions of life-history evolution, to test whether species face a trade-off when it comes to investing in heat or cold tolerance. Such information will provide valuable insights into how species will respond in the face of ongoing climate change. |
