School of Biological Sciences, Monash @MonashBiol

Can we extend passive acoustic monitoring of wildlife to individual monitoring? Lifi Huang and co-authors show that features learned by models pretrained on bird species data can be transferred to individual classification tasks with minimal effort. sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Rohan Brooker and co-authors find the ability of cleanerfish to adjust their activity in response to competition underscores the role of behaviour in maintaining cleaning networks on coral reefs. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

New results from Y Choy et al suggest that adaptation to combined stress allows basal cold tolerance and its plasticity to co-evolve, but not heat tolerance, highlighting the vulnerability of ectotherms to long-term climate change. researchgate.net/publication/...

Classic population genetics theory predicts that inbreeding restricts the range of conditions leading to balancing selection but, in those cases where it does occur it may still play a role in adaptation. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40659359/

Marine heatwaves select for thermal tolerance in a reef-building coral - Nature Climate Change The authors evaluate heritable genetic variation in thermal tolerance in a common reef-building coral. They show widespread heritable genetic variation, which is strongly associated with marine heatwa...

A study by EJ Howells and co-authors used spatial comparisons of quantitative genetic parameters and thermal history to provide evidence of widespread adaptive genetic variation and selection responses to climate warming in reef-building corals. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

John Bowman and Jonathan Levins present data that lend support to the idea that FGMYB was the female sex-determining gene in the ancestral land plant, which has been speculated to have been dioicous
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

How can we better integrate biodiversity information from a variety of sources to provide more robust species population information for multiple management and policy objectives? Frank Muller-Karger and co-authors outline a framework here pure.lib.usf.edu/ws/portalfil...

What do we know and understand about how plants respond to temperature? Avilash Singh Yadav and co-authors review existing knowledge
science.org/doi/full/10....

Do we understand collision risks for seabirds in offshore wind farms? Mark Miller et al produce a parameter database to support Procellariiform collision risk modelling for offshore wind farm impact assessment. besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirec...
@rohanclarke.bsky.social

Haploblocks contribute to parallel climate adaptation following global invasion of a cosmopolitan plant - Nature Ecology & Evolution Whole-genome sequences and field experiments focusing on the global invasive forage crop, Trifolium repens, show high levels of genetic variation across continents and parallel signatures of selection...

Do biological invaders encounter genetic bottlenecks that constrain adaptation? Paul Battley and colleagues find that introduced populations encompass high levels of genetic variation with little evidence of bottlenecks.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A Shift to Metapopulation Genetic Management for Persistence of a Species Threatened by Fragmentation: The Case of an Endangered Australian Freshwater Fish In a world where habitats are degrading and the climate is warming and becoming unpredictable, biodiversity conservation efforts and funding remain grossly inadequate. As part of a multifaceted appro....

Our paper on #genetic management of the #endangered Macquarie perch is published 🐟 🥳 !!!

We present a framework for #metapopulation management and our pipeline JeDi (for estimation of unbiased het, pi and Dxy from RRseq data) 🧬

@monashbiol.bsky.social #Bioinformatics

doi.org/10.1111/mec....

Core biological principles and tools stemming from basic Arabidopsis research Abstract. The model plant Arabidopsis thaliana has been a cornerstone of research in plant biology, contributing transformative insights into fundamental b

Arabidopsis research has informed other disciplines including human biology and Lucia Strader and co-authors describe the role of Arabidopsis in elucidating immune mechanisms here
academic.oup.com/plcell/advan...

Detailed surveys of an endangered skink find it is likely to decline in a region of high-elevation cloud rainforests supporting exceptional biodiversity and endemism. But it remains possible that gullies provide microclimatic refugia to climate change. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Jonathan Edwards et al describe a coalified log containing tunnels and coprolites attributable to termites plus smaller coprolites matching the size range of mites-the earliest trace fossil evidence of these taxa in circumpolar environments in Australia sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We have just opened searches for 3 new continuing Teaching & Research Academics. All positions are open at Level B (Lecturer) or Level C (Senior Lecturer), and we have one position in Genomics and two in Ecology.
careers.pageuppeople.com/513/cw/en/jo...

careers.pageuppeople.com/513/cw/en/jo...

The three academic positions (Lecturer/Senior Lecturer) in the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University are now advertised. Details here:

Ecology:
careers.pageuppeople.com/513/cw/en/jo...

Genomics:
careers.pageuppeople.com/513/cw/en/jo...

Please share.
We have a fully-funded PhD position on animal migration. If interested, please apply by 27 July. More about us: shawanchowdhury.com. @idiv-research.bsky.social @monashbiol.bsky.social @uq-cbcs.bsky.social

#PhDposition #Ecology #Conservation #Migration #Rstats #AcademicTwitter

Little Penguin (Eudyptula minor) family exiting burrow, Bruny Island, Tasmania, Australia. Photo: JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/)

Little penguins generally stick with their partners - but when the going gets tough, they opt for a divorce and find a new mate. Divorce rates are a useful predictor of the population's reproductive success: more divorces --> fewer chicks.

🧪🐧🌏

From @monashbiol.bsky.social, doi.org/10.1002/ece3...

The value of science communication blogs.cornell.edu/asap/events-...

Will evolving Dengue viruses at different temperatures affect their fitness in two different hosts? Fhallon Ware-Gilmore
@mattd_hall
Carla Sgro and colleagues have investigated this watermark.silverchair.com/veaf016.pdf?...

Half of the habitat of Australia's highly imperilled narrow-range species is outside protected areas Globally, species with small distributions face disproportionate extinction risk, with the impacts of land use change more likely to have catastrophic…

Globally, species with small distributions face disproportionate extinction risk. A case study by Michelle Ward et al serves as a template for the identification of important habitat for threatened species. sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The MACSYS Node at Monash University has multiple PhD Scholarships available to work on some exciting projects!
$41,753 p.a. stipend
PhD: 3.5 to 4 years
Additional funding available to support travel and advanced training
macsys.org/monash-phd-s...

Parenting Room @monashbiol.bsky.social

Equipped with armchair, mini lockable cupboard, change table, mini-fridge, and privacy screen.
Available for students, staff, and visitors. Please contact School Manager for access and long term key loan if required.

If you are a domestic student interested in working on insect migration/conservation or citizen science @monashbiol.bsky.social, please reach out ASAP. The domestic round deadline is May 31st. You can find more about our research interests here. shawanchowdhury.com.

Congratulations to Emily Roycroft who recently won the Dobzhansky Prize. monash.edu/science/news...

Pathogenesis-related protein is a general term often given to genes that are strongly induced by stress or pathogen attack. Yanfei Zhou, John Bowman and colleagues propose a model for flavonoid biosynthesis in Marchantia polymorpha. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Nutritional optima for life-history traits vary with temperature and across locally-adapted populations As the climate changes, populations must overcome more frequent and more extreme exposure to a wide range of stressors. However, our knowledge of how …

Nutrition and temperature can interact and
BrookeZanco and colleagues found that the negative effects of nutritional stress were significantly greater in tropical populations of fruit flies under warmer temperatures sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Luke D. J. Thomson of @monashbiol.bsky.social et al. investigated the effect of M-current activation on controller gain and obstructive sleep #apnoea severity via a randomised controlled trial using flupirtine 💊 🫁

📜 Read the #Research here: physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/...

Simple sequence repeats and their expansions: role in plant development, environmental response and adaptation Repetitive DNA is a feature of all organisms, ranging from archaea and plants to humans. DNA repeats can be seen both in coding and in noncoding regions of the genome. Due to the recurring nature of ...

What do we know about DNA repeats?
Sridevi Sureshkumar and colleagues emphasise the underexplored nature and immense potential of this area of research, particularly in plants nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...