How to: avoid tiny zippy animal escape

 Over the course of various research endeavours, I've worked on a wide variety of animals, ranging all the way from invertebrate larvae to tennis players. However, my biggest research projects have definitely been my Honours and my PhD, which I did/am doing on the Asian house gecko (Hemidactylus frenatus) and the yellow-footed Antechinus (Antechinus flavipes), respectively.

What do these two animals, a reptile and a small carnivorous marsupial, have in common? 

Asian house gecko vs. yellow-footed Antechinus. Image credit: Amanda Niehaus, Rebecca Wheatley.

Well, they're both pretty small. And they're also both pretty dang fast.

Cute little rascals. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons, Rebecca Wheatley.

These two factors create a high-stress environment when handling the animals is unavoidable but you can't quite handle the thought of them escaping. You can believe me when I say that handling tiny, zippy animals develops you some pretty epic reflexes – but, regardless of how good you get, sometimes you're bound to slip up and one will get away. Rather than spend half an hour crawling around the lab floor and occasionally smashing your head off low-hanging shelves, wouldn't it be good to have a way to handle them such that a dashing escape resulted in them not going anywhere?

Image credit: Rebecca Wheatley (left/right), Amanda Niehaus (middle).

This is where mums are great. I was lamenting over gecko escape (especially painful to recapture because they're prone to caudal autotomy, or tail-dropping), and my mum came up with a genius idea that's proven just as useful for Antechinus handling.

Luckily neither species minds a firm grip.

Step 1: Go buy a delicates bag from your local grocery store. Hell, buy a pack of three different sized ones for AUD$3.

Step 2: Put your animal's little hut in the bag.

Step 3: Put your arm in the bag, and zip it or draw-tie it up around your arm as depicted below.

Ratbags aren't escaping now! Image credit: Amanda Niehaus.

Step 4: Get the little brat out and do whatever you need with it. If it tries the great escape, guess what? It ain't getting out of the bag and is easy to recapture.

Various things you can do with the animals once they're in the bag - even if it's just getting a good grip so you can move it to something else.

So there you have it: a cheap, easy way to avoid tiny, zippy animal escape. Thanks mum! Here's to that genius gene transmission, right?

All images by Rebecca Wheatley unless otherwise credited.

A collection of sex-crazed maniacs

The time has come. The paperwork has been done; the preparations have been made. That's right: it's time to go get some study animals. Over the course of the next few months, our post-doc Amanda Niehaus and I (along with some fantastic volunteers) are starting to collect the animals my PhD will use, the yellow-footed Antechinus, Antechinus flavipes.

What a cutie. Image credit: Storm Martin.

If you don't know what an antechinus is, that's cool (you can see what they look like in the picture above) - they are fairly obscure animals that aren't all that well known even amongst the Aussies that share their habitat. Although they look like exceptionally pointy-faced mice, antechinus aren't rodents; they are members of the Dasyuridae, a family of small, carnivorous (usually insectivorous) marsupials. Some slightly better-known dasyurids include quolls and Tasmanian devils.

Unlike quolls and Tassie devils, antechinus are pretty tiny. Image credit: Storm Martin.

The antechinus' biggest claim to fame revolves around its wacky reproductive cycle. Unlike most mammals, antechinus are semelparous. That means that they invest all of their energy into one reproductive cycle and die shortly afterwards (unlike most other mammals, which are iteroparous, meaning that they reproduce multiple times throughout their life). The wacky component of all of this is that once the males reach reproductive maturity, they stop producing sperm; thus begins a frantic race to mate as many times as possible and spread their genes as far as they can before they die. Everything else gets shut down, and they literally breed until their bodies disintegrate. Sound extreme? Recent research has discovered that the reason for this frantically suicidal mating is probably due to intense sperm competition. In fact, both male and female antechinus are pretty friendly and like to cuddle up together at night, so there's actually little to no fighting going on at all. This makes them an awesome animal to work on, as their short life-cycle means that you can do multigenerational studies quite easily (and you can house them together).

Although they love to cuddle each other, antechinus aren't quite so fond of human handlers.

Although I'm still working out the specifics, my PhD is examining the effect of habitat structural complexity on performance, behaviour and overall fitness. Amongst other things, I'm looking at the effect the habitat complexity during development has on motor control and cognitive function in adults – for example, does exposure to a more complex habitat improve an animal's coordination as an adult? Does it improve its problem-solving abilities? These sorts of questions have applications well outside of the marsupial realm, so my results could be applicable to many other species. We're planning on establishing a breeding colony of semi-wild antechinus that we can raise in large, nature-simulating microcosms in order to investigate these questions.

Sunset at the Great Sandy National Park.

To collect our little darlings, we are travelling up north to the Great Sandy National Park near Cooloola, close to where a study by Geoffrey C. Smith identified a plentiful population back in 1984. Our first trapping trip took place last month, and while it took us a while to hit the right habitat (while it might sound specific, it turns out that "open sclerophyll with a complex understory" can actually apply to a wide range of habitats), we eventually managed to collect 12 antechinus of mixed sex.

Kuna, one of our little females. Image credit: Amanda Niehaus.

We caught other animals as well, including a few species of native rats. The bush rat, Rattus fuscipes, made frequent appearances and graced us with its delightful trap etiquette almost every day; any self-respecting rodent should know that the only acceptable way to behave when trapped in a small space with no way out is to defecate thoroughly and plentifully over every surface available. Anything else is pure barbarism. 

Despite their horrific smell, Rattus fuscipes are pretty dang cute.

We have at least a few more trips ahead of us before we'll have enough to start a breeding program to get our first set of babies to raise in controlled environments. Here's to hoping that this is the start of a beautiful (and productive!) friendship.

Smart, friendly (mostly) and completely adorable, not to mention sex lives that provide amazing party conversation fodder. Did I score? Heck yes! Image credit: Storm Martin.

All images by Rebecca Wheatley unless otherwise credited.

Optimality modelling in Tempe, AZ

I'm now 5 months into my PhD with the Wilson Performance Lab at the University of Queensland. I've been busy learning about small dasyurids, the effects of environmental enrichment and how to organise the paperwork required for sojourning into the field to collect animals. However, I also had a five week trip to Tempe, Arizona in the USA in February/March, where I did a crash course in modelling.

Towering saguaro (Carnegiea gigantea) and a brilliant blue sky in Lost Dutchman National Park (Sonoran desert).

No, don't worry guys, I haven't had a sudden delusional change in profession - I'm talking about the mathematical kind of modelling, which is mercifully camera-free (though the testing of said models doesn't have to be). I was doing some collaboration and learning as much as I could cram in at Mike Angilletta's Thermal Adaptation Lab at Arizona State University.

A defensively poised Arizona striped-tail scorpion (Paravaejovis spinigerus).

I was really excited about this, and not just because getting to go to the States for the first time was freakin' awesome or because meeting and working with new people is fun, but also because modelling is really, really useful. Not to mention desirable and, frankly, pretty sexy. Being able to model is almost like being that hot supermodel that everybody wants around. At least, that's what I like to tell myself.

Sonoran desert flowers.

What makes modelling so special? Well, it’s basically the process of constructing a mathematical function, or combination of functions, that allow us to predict what an animal (or a cell, or even an ecosystem) will do given a certain set of conditions and assumptions. A mathematical model is never a perfect representation of a biological system, but it does give us an excellent starting point for determining what assumptions are being violated, when they’re being violated, and therefore what we can expect under different conditions. Lots of ecologists avoid modelling because it involves mathematical equations, which is a scary prospect for most of us. Happily, it looks like my toiling through those first year undergraduate maths courses might pay off.

Beaver chewings along the San Pedro river.

While I was in Arizona, I was working on fine-tuning a model that Robbie and Mike started developing to calculate the optimal speed for an animal running from one end of a beam to the other when predators are around. Sound familiar? This sort of optimality modelling was part of what we did for our study on optimal serve speed in elite tennis players. This time, we were trying to find a model that predicted how fast an animal should run along a beam to minimise it's chance of slipping while maximising it's chance of outrunning the predator. In theory, this problem sounds fairly simple, but what is tricky is figuring out what matters and what doesn't, and learning how to program the model to do what you want it to (I'm using Python at the moment). I've still got a bit of debugging to do before the model is ready for testing, but getting stuck in was easier than you'd think!

A fishhook barrel cactus hanging with some hedgehog cacti.

In between learning some cool new techniques and becoming awesome, I got to do some sight-seeing and obsess over some new birds and reptiles. I went for a hike in the Sonoran desert at Lost Dutchman National Park, went birding at San Pedro House, attended my first American college party and checked out downtown Phoenix without splurging on some fantastically cheap jeans – and, to top it off, some of the lab took me camping at the Grand Canyon. Has anybody told me that I'm a lucky bugger? Why, yes. I'm not complaining!

A desert marigold (Baileva multiradiata) in the Sonoran desert.

I'd like to say a massive thank you to Robbie and my lab for sending me over there, and of course to Mike and his lab for having me. It was a fantastic experience, and hopefully the skills I learned will be useful to everyone. I'd also like to thank my awesome Arizona roommates for letting me tag along with them to various places, and just a giant thank you all around to everyone I talked to for being so friendly and welcoming!

The Grand Canyon.

All images by Rebecca Wheatley unless otherwise credited.