Quollity coordination

It's a new year, which means there's new research to be done as I delve into my PhD. But before I start writing about that, I want to write about a somewhat related experience I was lucky enough to have last year.

In August/September, I got to join my labmates Ami, Jaime and Gwen up on Groote Eylandt, which is a large island off the coast of the Northern Territory owned and run by the Anindilyakwa people. The reason: to help them out with their research on the endangered Northern Quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus). 

Catwoman, a pretty little female Northern Quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus).

Now, if you’ve ever been to Australia, you probably have heard the story of the Cane Toad (Rhinella marina) – even if it’s just via one of the many delightful novelty souvenirs available in Australian tourist shops.

A classy addition to any accessory collection. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

The cane toad is an extremely successful invasive species that was introduced into Australia in 1935 to eat a beetle that was negatively affecting the cane industry (which it didn’t), and since then it has spread down the East coast and across the Northern Territory, and is slowly making its way down the West coast as well. One of the reasons Groote Eylandt is so amazing is because it is one of the few areas up North that has remained cane toad-free. Because of this exclusion, it is the last stronghold population of the endangered Northern Quoll, whose numbers have been decimated via their predation on this toxic species. This makes Groote an ideal location to study the quoll in its natural habitat, as numbers are high enough for recapture studies to generate useful amounts of data.

A magical sunset in the bush next to the highway to Umbakumba.

 I was on Groote Eylandt for 5 weeks helping Ami with data collection for her PhD project. As well as stunning landscapes and amazing native animals, Groote Eylandt is also home to a large manganese mine. All animals need some amount of manganese to function, but like any heavy metal it can be toxic in high concentrations. For her PhD, Ami is looking at how quolls from different parts of the island (that have been exposed to different amounts of manganese) perform in motor control and cognitive function tests. We are lucky enough to have access to laboratory facilities at the Anindilyakwa Land and Sea Ranger Station, where we get to work with the Rangers to figure out how to do our research in a way that is compatible with indigenous culture.

Ami measuring one of our little darlings.

We went out every night and set 30-60 traps in one of our three trapping areas various distances from the manganese mine, which we then checked first thing the next morning. If we were lucky, we’d see white spots and hear some angry growling – otherwise it was rather likely that we’d caught one of the other marsupials that populate the area. We then transported our precious bundles back to the lab at the Anindilyakwa Ranger Station where we sexed them, weighed them, took various morphological measures and a hair sample (to get their internal manganese concentration from) and pit- and ear-tagged them.

Alfred, a feisty (and adorable) little male.

Lastly, we’d gather information on their level of motor control. I won’t give away too many details, but we basically assessed their performance at various speeds and analysed how many mistakes they made depending on the difficulty of the task and the speed at which they performed it. We would expect that as speed and/or “difficulty” of the task increases, the quolls will make more mistakes. The reasons for this are very intuitive and you will probably have observed them in your own life; as you do things faster you have less control over your movements and are more likely to make an error. Similarly, if a task is difficult, you’re more likely to make a mistake than if it’s relatively easy. What Ami wants to know is whether the manganese concentration the quoll has been exposed to enhances this effect – i.e., whether high manganese concentrations affect motor control.

Back to the bush you go.

Ami also wants to look at whether manganese concentration affects cognitive function in the quolls – but that’s for her to write about! She’ll continue to run these experiments for the next two years, and hopefully get some excellent results. I was very lucky to be involved in helping out with this project, as many of the techniques she used will be helpful in my own PhD.

Having a sniff out of the corner of his bag.

Although quolls were the main attraction for us, Groote Eylandt has plenty of other amazing qualities that made my trip there one of the most memorable ventures into the field that I’ve ever had. We are extremely privileged to be able to conduct research there, and I learned more about indigenous culture than I ever thought I would. I also saw loads of awesome animals and plants, and got to spend a lot of time in the field – which is definitely one of the best ways to spend it.

A Mertens' Water Monitor (Varanus mertensi) chilling by Milyerrngmurramaja (the "Naked Pools"). These guys are also threatened by ingestion of the cane toads. 

A Striated Pardalote (Pardalotus striatus) that was nesting next to the Anindilyakwa Ranger Station.

A Burton's Legless Lizard (Lialis burtonis) we found while we were setting traps near Alyangula.

A Helmeted Friarbird (Philemon buceroides) next to the highway to Umbakumba.

I’d like to say a huge thank-you to my lab for this opportunity, but most especially to Ami, Jaime and Gwen for teaching me so many new skills and being the best bush-buddies ever. I’m looking forward to future adventures with the Wilson Performance Lab as I start my PhD on another kind of carnivorous marsupial… the Yellow-footed Antechinus (Antechinus flavipes)!

Sunset on the beach at Ayangkwa ("Tasman Point"). 

All images by Rebecca Wheatley unless otherwise credited.

Birding Adventures in the Australian Outback

For 16 days this July, I had an adventure in the Australian outback. It had a road trip. It had camp cooking. It had sand dunes and scrubland and bush walks and hot springs and country towns and dragons and a marathon, and it had birds – lots and lots of birds.

An everlasting daisy.

Cloud formations over Big Red (Nappanerica), the largest sand dune in the Simpson Desert.

To be specific, I was lucky enough to be included on a remote field trip to survey birds in inland Australia for Dr Richard Fuller’s Spatial Ecology research group. I accompanied Master Birders Claire Runge and Nick Leseberg for two weeks of surveying along the Birdsville track, starting in Adelaide, South Australia and ending up in Birdsville, Queensland. I was primarily the expedition’s chef and scribe, but by the end of our trip I believe I had earned the rank of Novice Birder, seeing a total of 67 “lifers” (birds I’d never seen before) and starting a bird list of my own.

Brown Falcon (Falco berigora) taking flight.

A group of Zebra Finches (Taeniopygia guttata) chilling and preening at a highway petrol station.

By combining the results from their long-term surveys with remotely sensed data on weather and climatic conditions, the Fuller lab aims to determine how the distribution of birds in Australia’s remote regions is altered by climatic change. The surveys conducted along the Birdsville and Strzelecki tracks will also help us figure out exactly what birds are out there and where they go as the seasons change.

A Letter-winged Kite (Elanus scriptus) at dusk, preparing for a night of raptorish activity. Letter-winged Kites are uncommon and nomadic, and sighting numbers are further decreased by their nocturnal life history.

The Gibberbird (Ashbyia lovensis), a type of Australian chat only found on the gibber plains.

As we made our way across the country, we saw some amazing things. Some nights were spent camped out on gibber plains, without a single shrub in sight – a situation that was far more comfortable than you might imagine. In the mornings we found Gibberbirds, smooth-snouted earless dragons, and lots of old hand tools made by indigenous people long ago. We also found a nesting Inland Dotterel, faithfully sitting on her eggs until we unwittingly almost walked over her, when she leapt up and played the bird with the broken wing until we’d moved away.

Smooth-snouted Earless Dragon (Tympanocryptis intima) making itself look big. Most of the insects and reptiles out on the gibber plains are well camouflaged.

Nesting Inland Dotterel (Charadrius australis), sitting steadfastly on her four, well-camouflaged eggs.

Other nights we camped at Artesian hot springs, lush with vegetation and bird life. Here we got to hang out with Pied Stilts, White-breasted Woodswallows, Black-fronted Dotterels, Whistling Kites, along with hundreds of Galahs who shacked up for the night above our tents.

Morning at an artesian hot spring.

A Pied Stilt (Himantopus leucocephalus) fishing in an artesian hot spring.

It wasn’t just the fauna that amazed me – the adaptations of the plant life to such a harsh environment blew my mind. We surveyed at salt plains that looked like a scene from the bottom of the sea, or a kind of terrestrial coral reef. We trekked amongst the saltbush, including the chenopods with their spectacularly aggressive seed pods (seriously. Those things hurt!), Acacia and Eucalypt woodlands and Spinifex grasslands. We also found some furry trees along a riverbed, which turned out to be Acacias with minni ritchi, a type of reddish-brown bark that continuously peels back from the stem.

Samphire (Tecticornia sp.), a salty succulent that comes in all different colours and shades and looks kinda like a sea anemone.

With its leaves and flowers in different shades of green, with its huge succulent seed pods – I have no idea what this plant was, but it was beautiful.

An Acacia with minni ritchi (a type of bark that continuously peels back from the trunk and branches, giving the tree a furry appearance).

Despite the beauty of the places we were travelling through, there were some chilling reminders of some of the problems the ecosystem out there faces. The number of rabbits we saw was absolutely astounding – sometimes it was all I could do not to roll an ankle in the massive tunnel networks they’d created throughout some areas of the landscape. We also saw a disturbingly high number of prints from feral dogs, cats and foxes, all of which pose a massive predation threat to the small birds, reptiles and mammals that live there (especially ground-nesting birds like Lapwings and Dotterels). In addition, the degradation of the land by cattle and sheep was extremely obvious at many of the sites we surveyed.

Fox prints in the sand. Foxes are an invasive animal in Australia, and along with feral cats and dogs they pose a major threat to small mammals, reptiles and birds.

The skull of a small mammal, half buried in the ferrous oxide-rich dirt.

All of these things made me appreciate how fragile the balance of the ecosystem is. The research the Fuller lab is carrying out is not only important in determining how climate change will affect species distributions, but it also will help us determine where rare species like the Chestnut-breasted Whiteface and the Letter-winged Kite occur, and therefore which areas we should focus on conserving. We live in a beautiful world, with an amazing amount of biodiversity even within our harshest environments. It would be a shame to lose that biodiversity due to lack of knowledge and understanding.

Dusk and tracks (from Nick!) on Big Red.

This trip was a fantastic experience for me, and one that I know many people will never get to have. I am extremely grateful to the Fuller lab for including me on this research trip, and to Nick and Claire for making it so much fun. Thank you for the adventure!

Nick, Claire and I in front of our trusty 4WD at Wild Dog Hill in Whyalla Conservation Park. Image credit: Claire Runge.

A Wedge-tailed Eagle (Aguila audax) circling in the sunset at Stoke’s Hill.

All images by Rebecca Wheatley unless otherwise credited.

The Grand Slam: how hard should you hit?

The trade-off between performance and accuracy is a problem faced by a lot of different animals in a variety of situations. For example, consider a squirrel running along a bare branch to get from one tree to another; the faster it runs, the less time it spends exposed to predators. However, as the squirrel runs faster, it also increases its chances of mis-stepping and falling to its potential doom. So, to get the best of both worlds, the squirrel needs to optimise its running speed depending on its chance of slipping (the width of the branch) and the cost of falling off (the height from the ground).

Squirrels know what’s going down (or do they)? Image source: Wikimedia commons.

These sort of performance/accuracy trade-offs are also commonplace in the human world. How fast should you smash out a text message to your supervisor asking him (politely) to email back your latest draft before the number of typos makes the whole thing unintelligible?  In particular, these trade-offs are of a great deal of interest in elite sports. An awesome example of a sport where this trade-off is of utmost importance is in singles tennis. 

Serving hard: Heather Watson, Roger Federer and David Ferrer. Image source: Wikimedia commons.

In tennis, it’s pretty well accepted that if you serve really hard, it’s more difficult for your opponent to return the ball. But the harder you serve, the more likely it is that you’ll miss the service area and fault. So, players will usually belt it out on their first serve, but if they miss the first serve they’ll hedge their bets and serve softer the second time round to make sure they don’t double fault.

A/Prof Robbie Wilson, Dr Chris Brown and I have been testing this idea about performance trade-offs and optimal strategies using data from the men’s singles in the 2013 Australian Open. We’ve found this observation to be generally true: the probability of winning the point increases as the serve speed approaches its maximum, but the probability of faulting increases as well (for most players – some players are really consistent at getting it in regardless of how fast they serve). This was reflected in the frequency of high serve speeds in the first and second serves.

Jérémy Chardy, Andy Murray and Janko Tipsarevic. Image source: Wikimedia commons.

We’ve also constructed an optimality model which predicts the optimal serve speed taking into account the probability of faulting and the cost of a fault. An optimality model is, in essence, a mathematical model where you input the risks and rewards of a specific situation for a given individual, and it will tell you the optimal response for that individual if it wants to both minimise the risks and maximise the rewards. Optimality modelling is useful because it allows us to calculate the optimal response of specific individuals to any situation. We are looking at whether their opponent’s world ranking (ability to return a fast serve) and the point they’re going for or defending against (normal, game, set or match) affects their serve speed in relation to their optimum, but more on those results later.

Rafael Nadal, Caroline Wozniacki and Jérémy Chardy. Image source: Wikimedia commons.

We hope that our research can teach us more about how animals optimise their behaviour and physical efforts to improve their chances of successfully performing a given task. Depending on what we find, we might even be able to offer specific recommendations to tennis players wanting to improve their service game – who knows what the future might hold!

Andrew Hunter, a PhD student in our lab, is looking at performance/accuracy trade-offs in soccer. Will the results be similar between an individual and a team sport? We don’t know yet, but it will be interesting to find out.

Novak Djokovic, Agnieszka Radwańska and Venus Williams. Image source: Wikimedia commons.