Tropical conferences, and other fun things

I love my PhD. It can have its ups and downs, but the ups are really, really good.

A heart-shaped reef in Queensland. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

I just got back from Cairns, where I went for Behaviour 2015 - a conference of epic proportions that was equally epic amounts of fun. I was able to give a talk about my research on movement decisions in the Antechinus in Escape and Avoidance. I also listened to dozens of fascinating talks from researchers from all over the world. I learned that spiders can count, that shy elephant shrews get more parasites, and that duels may have a hand in the evolution of exaggerated weaponry. I saw a colony of spectacled flying foxes, and new species of dove for my bird list. I met a bunch of awesome people who do awesome things, and got to snorkel on the Great Barrier Reef.

Spectacled flying foxes. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

If that wasn't enough excitement for one week – right at the start of the conference, my first PhD paper (and first ever first author paper) was published online in Integrative and Comparative Biology. I'm ridiculously excited about this, and this week I was lucky enough to get to write an article about it in The Conversation.

I'm really grateful for all the opportunities I've been given, and it definitely wouldn't happen without the support of my fantastic supervisory team, collaborators and lab group. Thanks, guys!

Adventures of the ever-changing PhD

To paraphrase from a famous romance (which is increasingly how I'm visualising my relationship with my PhD): it is a truth universally acknowledged, that any study involving a cool organism will never work out as expected.

It turns out that we're actually working on the buff-footed Antechinus (Antechinus mysticus), which was described in 2012 by Dr Andrew Baker and members of his mammal ecology lab at QUT. Unfortunately, despite having a cool scientific name and being completely adorable, it turns out that our A. mysticus didn't really want to breed in captivity. So they didn't work out quite as well as we'd hoped in terms of starting up a breeding colony. Though this might seem like a problem (and it did prove rather stressful), it actually turned out well for me: I got to come up with a whole new, awesome angle for my PhD.
 

One of our female buff-footed Antechinus (Antechinus mysticus).

While I am keeping parts of my habitat complexity study, I decided to focus my PhD much more closely on something I'm really passionate about: predicting optimal performance and understanding animal movement decisions in the wild.

Another female A. mysticus, hiding out in their fake trees. Image credit: Amanda Niehaus.

Antechinus are fantastic for this, because they have some absolutely amazing performance capabilities. They're like crazy little sharp-toothed ninjas. At the end of last year, I did a lot of work on predicting the optimal running speed for an animal escaping a predator along a beam. Currently I'm working on experiments building on some work my research group did on the Northern quoll. I even had the opportunity to present some of this work at the SICB conference in Florida. But more on that very soon! 

Seriously. Like ninjas. Image credit: Amanda Niehaus.

I guess what I'm getting at is that sometimes, even when it seems like everything is going wrong, "disasters" can be an opportunity in disguise. I know everyone always says things like that, and it does sound kind of contrived, but sometimes – it's actually true. I'm even more interested in my new PhD questions than I was in my old ones, and they're going to allow me to practice and hone my modelling skills – which is pretty fantastic, in my book. I've been making great progress, and I'm really excited by the results I've been getting. I'll be updating you on some of my findings very shortly. Until then...

A little teaser for some of my experiments, based off work done on the Northern quoll. Will be posting more information and links about this soon.

All images by Rebecca Wheatley unless otherwise credited.