Centre for the Integrative Study of Animal Behaviour

Macquarie University News (April, 2006)

Features

Talking to the animals

Six Macquarie University researchers, from three different departments, have come together in a new Centre that aims to become the pre-eminent research group in Australia for the study of animal behaviour.

How do desert ants find their way around? Why do some female spiders start eating their mates after (in some cases before) sex? How good is an echidna's memory? What do female fruit flies look for in a male?

Without Dr Doolittle, these types of questions can only be answered by animal behaviour experts - an area of scientific research that combines fields as diverse as psychology, biology and genetics.

Over the past decade, Macquarie University academics have joined together informally to study a diverse array of species in captivity and in the wild.

But at the beginning of 2006 a new Centre for the Integrative Study of Animal Behaviour was established, which its Director, Associate Professor Chris Evans, says will enable new levels of interdisciplinary research.

Associate Professor Rob Harcourt underwater.

"The Centre will bring together the intellectual and technical resources of six externally funded laboratories, across two Divisions, to create a community of 31 postgraduate students and four postdoctoral fellows with closely complementary interests," Evans says. "This will be the largest and most productive such grouping in Australia, and competitive with the best overseas."

Due to the many approaches that come together in animal behaviour research, its findings benefit the scientific world and society at large in many ways. Understanding how animals function in the natural world provides benefits for wildlife conservation, robotics, and the battle against insect pests.

The members of the Centre are:

Associate Professor Chris Evans (Director) studies communication and cognitive processes in a wide range of organisms, including birds, lizards, fish and marsupials.

Evans worked for many years to crack the code of acoustic communication in birds. He has discovered that signals of fowl make up a more complex and sophisticated 'language' than previously believed - with a variety of calls to alert others about food and predators.

Evans has also coordinated research into the complex sequence of movements - including tail-lashing, arm-waving and push-ups - that jacky dragons use to communicate aggression and appeasement, and ways to train tammar wallabies raised in captivity to avoid introduced predators like foxes - which will be of great benefit to conservation programs.

Associate Professor Rob Harcourt is Director of Marine Science at Macquarie University and heads the Marine Mammal Research Group, which focuses on the behavioural ecology, population dynamics, and conservation of wildlife such as dolphins, seals and penguins in Australia and the Antarctic.

A particular focus of Harcourt's work has been conservation of endangered marine creatures including southern right whales and the grey nurse shark. Sharks unlike whales and dolphins are not so popular with the public, and grey nurse sharks which are harmless fish eaters are the victims of a bad image. They were decimated by spearfishing in the 1960s and are now critically endangered in New South Wales waters. Harcourt and his colleagues have calculated that grey nurse sharks off eastern Australia will probably become extinct in the near future unless major changes are made to protect them.

Harcourt's other recent programs have focused on how Antarctic seals find their food under the ice, how they select their mates and how sea lions recognise each other, and his team are working on many different aspects of dolphin behaviour and ecology.

A central theme of the research undertaken by psychologist Associate Professor Ken Cheng concerns how animals process information, which is crucial for many important behaviours in an animal's life, including choosing a mate, avoiding predators, and finding food.

Cheng has studied humans, rats, pigeons, chickadees, Clark's nutcrackers, desert ants, and honeybees, focusing on how these animals deal with space and time. For example, he has led research into the memory of the red honey ant, found in the Central Australian desert, specifically on how it navigates its way around.

Cheng's experiments on memory in honeybees have investigated how the foragers find - and remember - a rewarding place. He's also collaborated on research into the prolific memory of the Clark's nutcracker, which stores food in thousands of caches; spatial and temporal cognition in pigeons and humans; and signal interactions between crab spiders, flowers, and bees.

The team from the Centre for the Integrative Study of Animal Behaviour.

Biologist Dr Marie Herberstein is involved in several research projects on foraging, anti-predator and mating behaviours of various spiders and mantids, with a special focus on orb-web spiders.

Using field observations and experiments as well as laboratory experiments, she has investigated web construction and spider behaviour in order to establish how these animals maximise the likelihood of prey interception and their overall capture success.

The courtship and mating behaviour of orb-web spiders is also intriguing to her, as sexual cannibalism is very common. The questions her research addresses include: Why do females cannibalise the male after and sometimes before copulation? How do males find females? and what are the costs and benefits of mating for males and females?

Dr Darren Burke is an experimental psychologist who studies visual perception and spatial cognition in humans and other animals, not just in terms of how they work, but also the ecological, functional, or evolutionary reasons why they work this way.

With humans, Burke has led research into the kinds of information people most easily use to discriminate objects from one another. Some of this research has focused on how we perceive and recognise human faces in terms of the spatial relationships between the parts, as well as in terms of attractiveness and emotion.

Other research involves different aspects of visual perception and memory of humans, jacky dragons, echidnas, honeybees, rodents, sea lions and penguins.

The main focus of Dr Phil Taylor's work in recent times has been understanding the mating behaviour of the Queensland fruit fly, which is crucial to efforts in Australia and around the world to control damage to crops by this pest and its relatives.

Taylor has been working for a number of years with Australian and international researchers on the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT), an environmentally benign method used to control fruit fly whereby millions of flies are produced in a factory, rendered sterile by radiation, and then released into nature. Wild flies that mate with the released sterile flies are unable to reproduce. Hence fly numbers are reduced in the next generation without the use of expensive, environmentally and medically hazardous insecticides.

Taylor's laboratory has recently expanded into a new line of research on aggressive mimicry by assassin bugs that hunt spiders by pretending to be insects caught in the web. By using hi-tech lasers to record web vibrations, the researchers are able to eavesdrop on how the bug chooses different signals to deceive its spider prey.

The team from the Centre for the Integrative Study of Animal Behaviour. From left: Dr Marie Herberstein, Dr Phil Taylor, Associate Professor Ken Cheng, Dr Darren Burke, Associate Professor Rob Harcourt, and Associate Professor Chris Evans.

For more information visit http://galliform.bhs.mq.edu.au/~cisab/

Email the researcher: chris.evans@mq.edu.au
Email the Media Manager: kathy.vozella@mq.edu.au

Story by Greg Welsh