There are a number of ongoing projects in the lab that include opportunities for honours and MPhil students and undergraduate involvement more generally. Send Terry an email if you're interested in any of the research we do. Some possible examples are given below.
Habitat “islands” have been estiblished in open grassland adjacent to remnant forest at a site in the NSW Central Tablelands. There are numerous potential projects available. For example, how does the size of habitat fragments and their distance from a colonising source population determine colonisation rates and ultimately species diversity, or how does environmental disturbance applied as part of the experimental design impact island biodiversity. Other projects might consider the interaction of food webs and trophic guilds on how communities are formed and persist on islands.
Walking through the Australian bush, it is quite common to come across large ant nests connected by busy highways cutting through the grass and undergrowth. We know surprisingly little about these networks or how they change from year to year.
With a combination of GPS and new mathematical tools developed by network analysts it is possible to map ant nests and measure their size and the level of traffic flow between nests. The project would investigate how ant communities in each nest interact, whether some nests are central to the overall network, and how new nests become established in the network.
There are a variety of potential projects on the social behaviour of kangaroos. In terms of social play, potential projects include the study of play behaviour in juveniles and subadults, how play is related to the sex andsocial rank of individuals, or the function of play in the maintenance of social networks and how those networks might change over time. For aggression, projects might focus on the rules that govern combat and the maintenance of dominance, how aggression dictates mating opportunities or the formation of harems.
Key hypotheses behind why there is so much diversity in the way animals communicate with one another in the natural world is the need for species recognition, or reliable cues for rival or mate assessment, or signals that will standout in the environment they are given. Potential projects on these themes will leverage a massive library of field-recorded video documenting the movement displays of multiple species of lizard.
