Have you ever wondered what an ecologist does on a daily basis? Well, it basically depends on where their interests lie. For me, I spend a lot of time reading, listening and observing the world around me. The cool thing about being an ecologist is that I can sit in an urban area, look out a window or even drive somewhere and can always make some sort of observation or discovery. I have had a keen interest in urban ecology for some time and I often wonder how animals adapt to urban environments and live with us successfully. How do they know that a window of a new building will become a food source each morning? It's questions like this that I ponder regularly. Noisy Miners, for example, are able to find insects on new buildings and keep returning to the same area. Ibis, although classified by many as pests or 'flying rats', have successfully adapted to having a constant food source in the shape of rubbish. They now nest in a variety of tips, rubbish dumps and urban vegetation where their numbers have greatly increased, when they were once just waterbirds. This adaptation is fascinating as they have not only adapted to the urban sprawl but they have learnt where food sources are constant and what to specifically look for within gardens, parks and schools. You can literally see them flying across your backyard sometimes, scouring the area for food. The Australian White Ibis would normally feed on a range of terrestrial and aquatic invertebrates within swamps, lagoons, floodplains and grasslands but, as we have disturbed this habitat, they are now relying on the urban sprawl for food. Ibis searching through a bin. Tom Lang/Flickr, CC BY-NCI visited the tip recently and observed a number of native bird species rummaging through food scraps that people had thrown away. The smell was horrendous but the birds were rather plump and eager to feed on the scraps available. Species included Magpie Larks, Ibis, Magpies, Indian Mynahs and Noisy Miners. A lot of these species are classified as pests but I've asked myself this question many times, are they really pests or just surviving a world we created? I wouldn't say they are to blame for trying to survive an urban world where resources are limited and competition is high. Some species are just more resilient than others. Just like people really.
If I'm not pondering thoughts like this and how to test my hypotheses, I'm usually entering data from some of the research I have going or making collaborations with other scientists for new projects. I also spend time writing articles for scientific journals and thinking about the best way to present the data I have collected. It's more like a hobby that you don't always get paid for as you end up putting a lot more hours into it than the hourly rate you would expect from any other job. It's not something that you can guarantee money from either so it becomes a career that is like being an artist and with this current employment climate, you take whatever opportunity comes your way whilst still completing the parts you love outside of that for free. My own journey now involves teaching science to school students and providing them with the opportunities to make their own discoveries about the natural world. I also have a fond love of science communication so I feel it is important to share with the world what discoveries are made in terms of my own research so that everyone can understand it and know about it, not just scientists that read scientific jargon. One also has to pick an area of interest and stick to that to become an expert, even though that may take many years without pay for the work completed. The role must be about the love of ecology, animals and plants, not the money because that won't inspire you to continue day in day out. These are the thoughts that constantly run through my head but I wouldn't give it up for anything and I'll always want to conduct research, whether it's for free or paid due to my need to make discoveries about the natural world. Each time consuming task and thought makes an ecologist, not the job title.
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On Monday, I was able to head out bush to do some surveying of sites with and without Bell Miners and dieback. There was a variety of sites where Bell Miners were heard and these are reflected in the six photos I have provided below. The understorey contained Lantana, grassy understorey, water vine and some tea tree. The trees also ranged in health too with some having full crowns to numerous dead trees. High numbers of birds were present in areas with minimal signs of dieback, suggesting that the birds had been there for some time but the trees weren't suffering. I haven't seen this area before and it shed new light on how Bell Miners might be choosing to inhabit an area. The photograph on the far bottom right contained birds within this area and in the healthier trees surrounding it. There was another area like this with minimal tink calls and nearby healthier trees where more calls were heard. The more calls there are in an area, the more birds there are as Bell Miners call, on average 2-3 times per minute all day long as my previous study found. It would be easy, in this case, to think that the birds had caused the dieback and then moved to trees where more food was available. However, I do not have information on the history of this site so I cannot say where the birds moved to or from and this is the type of information that is required to make such a statement.
It is easy to make a judgement based on the photographs that one collects or from the one area that one is able to visit. This was clear in one site where the trees were healthy, Lantana was minimal and there were many birds. When I walked further down the road and down the slope, Lantana got thicker, trees got sicker and there was a large canopy opening with many dead stags. I could make many assumptions about this site that fit in with my own hypothesis but to be a good scientist, one must consider all of the sites through the distribution of the species and, in this case, that ranges from Gympie in Queensland all the way down to Melbourne, Victoria. I have only skimmed the surface of what is really happening and I think the habitat choices of Bell Miners have not yet been properly described. Nor has their role in dieback, where trees become stags after long periods of stress. This is now my mission to determine what this species does throughout its range, not just in one area so that we can manage areas adequately in areas where tree death is occurring. I feel like a detective of sorts that is lucky enough to discover what the Bell Miner is doing in its private life within the forest and urban areas. I also urge anyone that is interested in being a part of this project to report their sightings to the page and photos to the Facebook page for my citizen science project, Bell-Miner-Colony Project. Bell miner (Manorina melanophrys) habitat on the roadside, Kempsey-Armidale Rd. A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I took a trip out to a local bell miner colony near Armidale that resides on the side of the road going towards Kempsey. This colony is rather interesting because the understorey was once Lantana camara but is now full of 'clumps' of watervine, a native nesting plant of choice for the bell miner. As you can see in the photograph above, there are now a lot of native plant species here where the colony resides along a creek. However, looks can be deceiving. The further we explored the creekside, the more signs of weeds we found. Lantana had been sprayed recently on the other side of the creek and it was starting to emerge on the right. There was also soda apple (Solanum viarum) another noxious weed, that was beginning to grow along the creek. Some of the trees also seemed to have some leaf cover and minimal signs of dieback but as we followed the creek, we began to see signs of dieback where lantana had been sprayed and weeds were beginning to sprout. From these observations, it is easy to see that only looking at a small part of the habitat can result in missing the story of what goes on within the vegetation of a bell miner colony. In order to tell the full story, one must monitor and explore the habitat of any given site and determine the history of their inhabitance. Unfortunately, there is little information about what makes a colony inhabit and stay in an area so I have made it my mission to gather more information on the vegetation that bell miners use for habitat. For a species that is blamed for dieback, we know so little about it.
8/6/2016 0 Comments How do orb-weaving spiders fair in urbanisation? Telling the story of my garden resident
While this study was only conducted in Sydney, the study sites included recreational parks and gardens, remnant patches and continuous bushland and housing was only included as a surrounding to parks and gardens, the results were rather interesting. The authors measured body size and ovary weight and found that urbanisation had a positive effect. Spiders were smaller in areas with more vegetation cover and larger in areas with hard surface cover. Ovary size showed a similar relationship with spiders having larger ovaries in areas with more hard surfaces and less leaf litter. Their results also found that spiders were larger due to urbanisation over large scales in terms of vegetation loss and the presence of hard surfaces.
In relation to the spider we had observed, this study helped to explain why our garden resident had chosen to build a web under the carport and next to the fence. Also, it could explain why it died suddenly. We had a cold snap in Armidale and based on this article, it seems that it may still have been exposed to the colder weather as it was not directly under the carport but more out in the open. Regardless, it definitely seems like this spider is doing well in the new ecosystem it now survives in alongside us. However, it is unknown how well this species is doing in the colder climate of Armidale compared to Sydney and this could be an interesting avenue of investigation. All these interesting thoughts and reading stemmed from the presence of one little spider that took up residence in our garden. Gotta love being an ecologist :) Booroolong Frog, Litoria booroolongensis, is an endangered species of frog known only from the tablelands and slopes of New South Wales. It typically inhabits rocky western-flowing creeks and their headwaters, although a small number of animals have also been recorded in eastern-flowing streams.(Source: link) For the last two years, the Booroolong Frog has prevented the development of Chaffey Dam required to improve water security for the Tamworth community. As you may know, this species is endangered and under the Threatened Species Conservation Act 1995, this species is protected. This means that the critical habitat of the endangered species must be protected and the key threatening processes that threaten the survival of such a species must be properly assessed. The other main purpose of the Act is to encourage the conservation of threatened species, populations and ecological communities through cooperative management. This tiny frog is protected under this legislation and as such, any type of development that threatens its habitat must involve an impact assessment before development consent under the EPA Act 1979 can be granted. These assessments consider whether there will be a significant effect on any threatened species, population or ecological community.
The funniest part about this story is that Barnaby Joyce, our Agricultural Minister, former New England MP, was announcing the development of the dam when one of the frogs started croaking. Someone identified it and the stalling of development began as told by ABC radio yesterday. Booroolong Frog = 1, Barnaby = 0. Now the Minister is on a personal endeavour to 'beat' the frog and continue developments all over the country for a range of projects. Yes, we need water and construction but at what cost? He also went on to say that the extreme greens are to blame and “Ladies and gentlemen, that is the alternative - Labor, in conjunction with the Greens, usurping the resources and academia of brilliant people to come up with wonderous new ways to say no - but we are a nation of builders.” I'm not sure that Barnaby really understands the reasons why ecologists such as myself want to preserve this species and why there is legislation in place for that very reason. We aren't here to stop development but there must be a balance. What's more, without these 'ecosystem services' as agricultural research is now terming it, there would be no pollination of crops or balanced soil chemistry or health river systems. If we don't make sure that these species remain and survive within agricultural land, putting it bluntly, we won't be eating. Then what will come of your precious building? I challenge Barnaby Joyce and all politicians to look at the bigger picture, not just pleasing people to be re-elected. We must ensure that the environment is here for generations to come, not for the survival of animals that supposedly get in your way but to ensure our own survival and our food resources. Working as an ecologist is probably nothing like most people imagine. It requires a lot of work. Monotonous, laborious work that some days you wonder why you followed this career path and whether you should have taken the easy road of becoming a nurse or a solicitor where the hours are guaranteed and there is some time to yourself. But after pointing out the major negatives at the beginning of your career, there are some major benefits that keep you going. Working with nature and animals.
If I didn't love nature and animals as much as I do, I don't think I could continue with the long hours and the variety of rejections that publishing brings. Not to mention the constant search for permanent work. This career is not an easy ride from graduating to employment. You won't get that guaranteed job that most undergraduates believe they will when they start their Bachelor of Zoology. You need to sell yourself. Get involved in anything you can and make so many networks that when people are looking to employ someone even as a field assistant, they think of you first. It's all about volunteering, publishing and taking all the 'scraps' of work that is on offer. You need a thick skin to keep going and push through even though it seems like giving up is the easier option. At the end of the day, you need to say to yourself, what do I want to be doing with my life? If the answer is researching and answering your own questions above everything else, keep going. Don't give up. You will get there in the end and you will get to see amazing things that most people never get to see. On a daily basis, you may spend hours entering data, replying to emails, working on a manuscript that just keeps getting rejected or analysing data. You may be lucky enough to go out into the field and collect data. This is my favourite part of the job! It's what I live for and what I enjoy most about my job. There are many boring bits but if you want to answer your own question based on something you are curious about, your curiosity will get you through. My interest in snakes started when I was younger. I was taken to wildlife sanctuaries as a child and got to hold pythons and admire snakes behind glass walls. I also got to play with a few corn snakes, a 9 kilogram jungle python and two diamond pythons during my work placement at Taronga Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo. It's not the easiest thing to look after a large python that just wants to go exploring rather than getting some sunshine. But it wasn't really until I went to uni to start my PhD that I really got into snake rescuing. A colleague was part of the local carers group and was the current snake rescuer at the university. She was leaving and her stories made me consider becoming the next person in zoology to wrangle snakes. It sounded so rewarding and I wanted to learn more about venomous snakes as I was going out into the bush alone. Definitely a good survival skill to have in case I was ever in the wrong place at the wrong time. FYI I never had any close calls or mishaps during field work but that's another story for another blog post. I decided to go and attend the non-venomous snake course and see how I liked it. I'd always wanted my own pet snake and this was a good way to learn more about handling pythons and other non-venomous reptiles. I traveled to a small village just outside Lismore for a Saturday training course. I spent the day listening to experts about the handling of reptiles and their behaviours. I found the whole thing fascinating. We got to 'rescue' pythons from branches and pick them up behind the head. I was really unsure of what I was doing at first. How can you tell if you're hurting the snake or not as you try to remove it from a branch? Is it going to get cranky and strike at you? I learnt that experience tells you how much pressure to put on a stick and where to put it to support the spine of the snake. I also learnt that you can test the temperament of each individual snake before you try to remove so you know which approach to take to reduce any kind of defensive move against your face. I then went out into the field and came across two pythons which just happened to be right at my feet when I looked down after collecting data. It was a cool morning and I saw both of them in the same day. Before the snake handling course, I may have been a little scared as I didn't know how to react to a python in the wild but after it I was just in awe of their beauty. These pythons were not worried by my presence at all, despite the 'S' bend of the first one in the photograph. He was like this when I found him and he barely moved even when I got up close. The second one was directly at my feet. I was glad I didn't step on him and we just stood together for a few moments, not really worried about each other's presence with me just admiring the beauty of a warming python in the morning. A coastal python found during my PhD fieldwork near Kyogle, NSW in 2012. Another coastal python, much smaller than the first in the leaf litter sitting next to my shoe near Kyogle, NSW in 2012. After I had completed the non-venomous course, I decided I should pursue the venomous snake handling course, even just to understand the behaviour of the venomous snakes that I would come across in the field. It was the scariest and most amazing experience I ever had. It was the first time I got close enough to an eastern brown to pick it up by the tail. I also fell in love with red-belly black snakes. The really are the gentlemen of the venomous snakes. So placid and so beautiful. The red underbelly with the shiny black is so pretty in the sun. The eastern brown seems so clever and never wanted to 'attack' me or be aggressive but instead, they just wanted to run away, contrary to all the 'stories' we here in the media and through word of mouth. No wonder people are so scared of them when all we here is 'oh it chased me down the road!'. These creatures are so misunderstood and will never hurt you unless you stand on them by accident or corner them. But who wouldn't get cranky and defensive if someone did that to them? I know I would. They are far more afraid of us than we are of them and they are such shy creatures. I rarely saw them out in the field and I was out there for a week at time. At one point, I even had one run over my foot and the only reason I knew was that someone walking behind me told me about it. After this course, I began to rescue snakes and lizards from the general public. I say rescue from people because, in reality, the people are far more dangerous than the venomous snake. They will only bite if it's their last resort. It takes a lot of energy to create venom so why would they waste it on a person when they can't eat them? The photo below was of a significant rescue my husband and I attended at the university. This eastern brown juvenile was in a gym in one of the colleges. A student went to do a weight session and surprisingly came across the snake under one of the weights. To his credit, he ran, locked the door and told the admin people so they could close off the area and call us. We went there and located it hiding behind one of the weights. It wasn't angry but frightened and once it realised what we were doing, went straight into the container with the pillowcase and hid. That's not to say that all rescues go this smoothly, as they don't. If people have frightened the snake or cornered it before we get there, it can become dangerous but generally, the snakes just want to hide. We captured it and then realised it outside of town near a creek with some long grass. The reason this snake had entered the gym was a large gap under the door. Juveniles are looking for somewhere to live where there is water and food. We get a lot of calls about juveniles during Spring/Summer when they are on the move but if there is no habitat, they keep moving. From these experiences I learnt there is nothing to fear with snakes. They don't go out of their way to harm people. They are shy and misunderstood. They just want to run away and will only bite if they feel they have no other options. With advances in medical science, it is rare that a person will die from a snake bite, especially when a snake bandage is applied. It's really all about educating people to respect these creatures rather than instilling fear. Fear is what will get you killed. That's what causes people to do stupid things like chasing a snake to kill it or shooting it. You are safer just to leave the snake to get on with its day and remove anything that could create habitat. Snakes have their place in the world as they eat mice, frogs and skinks. Without this predator, other species would take over ecosystems, creating plagues and damage to crops and houses. So don't fear the snake, educate yourself and your family. Who knows, you may even learn to love them :) A juvenile eastern brown found in a gym. Note the black bands. This species comes in a range of colours so sometimes it is difficult to identify.
20/1/2016 0 Comments Becoming an ecologist Choosing to follow your dreams is probably one of the most significant decisions that you will make during your lifetime. Discovering what your dream job is can be another matter entirely. In high school, you're meant to know exactly what you want to be when you grow up but it probably isn't that simple. I remember going through about five different choices from being a psychologist to a jet pilot in the Air Force. Luckily for me, the one thing I always came back to was working with animals. It had started for me when I was kid. I was always picking up snails and slugs and admiring their beauty when others thought they were 'gross'. I learnt that I had to have a thick skin because not everyone believed the same things I did about nature and some couldn't understand why I would want to work with animals or run around in national parks with the boys when girls in my class were going to parties and buying dresses.
It wasn't until I started university that I found out there were plenty of 'zoologists' out there like me that loved to go bush walking and admire animals all day long. What was even better than that, I found a degree that let me study those animals and write about them all day long too. But it wasn't all fun and games. I had to work at a fast food joint to pay the bills and I hated serving customers but I used it to finish that degree and start the next phase of my life. I found out that a degree won't guarantee you a job so I started my honours project which involved following birds around for an hour and a half at time to answer questions about their behaviour and habitat choice in an urban environment. I learnt that I loved conducting research. It was then suggested to me that I complete a PhD. Once this idea was in my head, I couldn't get rid of it. Come hell or high water I was going to pursue this dream and complete more research. However, starting this dream took some extra work as I missed out on 1st class honours by 1%! I was so disappointed. My relationship also ended and I went on a journey to achieve my goal of starting a PhD. I worked as a consultant for a year and dabbled in family law but I knew from these experiences that I had to keep going to finally get acceptance. It took two years after my honours year finished before I decided on a project and was awarded an APA. For those of you who don't know, an APA is a scholarship that allows you to feed yourself and pay rent during your PhD research. This came in handy, as without it, I would have struggled to work and study, particularly as I had to travel away for a week every two weeks or so for field work. Even this part of the process became difficult as I was initially awarded the PhD position but had to reapply for the APA and fight tooth and nail to get it in terms of administration. But it was definitely worth it. I got to start my own project and complete research that involved heading out into the bush for days at a time without face to face contact with people. I loved every moment of it! Of course there were days where I hated it and things went wrong. I became allergic to any insect that injected anti-collagen and now have severe reactions to it including nausea and major swelling at the bite site. I had one site of a lantana experiment sprayed with glyphosate that was meant to be a control, two near misses with cars on a dirt road and a large branch that nearly fell on my head. But none of these things were enough to stop me from accomplishing my dream and last March (2015) I submitted my thesis. I was lucky enough to only have fairly minor revisions when the reviews came back and I'm now graduating in April this year! Yey! Come at me red cape! I even managed to score myself a husband who helped me complete some of the fieldwork, clean the house and ensure that I took a break every now and then to stop and eat some chocolate. As hard as it is, between holding down a relationship, sanity, a household and conducting research, it is possible to chase your dreams. All you really need to do is decide what that dream is and make sure it happens no matter how long it takes and how many obstacles you have to deal with during the process. Who knows? It may even help you find the perfect project in the long run. So don't give up. There's light at the end of the tunnel and animals to discover. Arachnophobia, the fear of spiders, is one of the most common and oldest fears in Western culture. Ophidiophobia is the second most common phobia in the world. Just a photograph of either animal is enough to freak someone out. So where do these fears originate? Non-human animals have revealed an evolved predator recognition mechanism that recognises the appearance of recurring threats. One study found that 5 month old human infants respond to images of realistic images of spiders for longer than non-threatening images of flowers. The results suggest that a cognitive mechanism may be used to detect life threatening animals throughout evolutionary history. However, this study involved having an infant sitting on a parent's lap as images were shown. If the parent was fearful of the animal themselves, the infant could pick up on this response and mirror it, causing the infant to learn from the parent as a previous study suggests that used facial expressions for testing fear learning. Research is now re-assessing how infants respond to snakes and spiders. A study published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology examined whether infants find snakes frightening or merely attention grabbing. Six to nine month olds observed a series of videos with audio including a video of a snake or an elephant with a fearful or happy audio with startle magnitude, heart rate and latency to startle measured. Snakes were found to capture infant's attention but their startle responses were no different to elephant videos, even with a fearful voice. As the startle response was low and their heart rate was low, the results indicate that the infants were not scared. The current research, therefore, suggests that infants are not born with a fear of snakes but merely show an interest in these animals. The same occurs with spiders. These fears are thus culturally conditioned as infants do not have an innate fear of snakes or spiders, just an interest in their form or movement. This response may make it easier to learn a fear but it's not the first response. The research instead suggests that we have evolved to quickly identify dangerous animals and avoid them. So if our fear of snakes and spiders is not innate, how do some people become so frightened? The reality is animals have developed ways of learning about dangers that are not dependent on first hand experience. Individuals can learn about predators by observing other individuals within their own species. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), for example, live in family groups and when they observe a snake, the juveniles watch the adult's reaction. They mirror the alert calls of the adults so the group will know to move to safety. They learn fear. In this way, parents pass on knowledge to their offspring. The same thing happens for people. Children are taught to be scared of snakes and spiders at a young age. This usually occurs because the parents are either scared of these animals themselves or they are scared their children will be hurt so they teach them to stay away from them by installing fear. The trick is not to be scared of these creatures but to understand their behaviour and know how to respond to their presence.
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