by Tracey Moore. A recent study looking into the effectiveness of 1080 baiting in Western Australian wheatbelt reserves noted a single fox surviving after 8 baiting campaigns (Marlow et al. 2015). This signifies we are up against some clever foxes when it comes to the control of wild canids. After all the saying ‘cunning as…
Tag: Curtin University
Some like it hot: Temperature-dependent Sex Determination (TSD) in reptiles
by Ash Wolfe. Did you know that the surrounding atmospheric temperature of an egg can influence whether a reptile will hatch as a boy or a girl? This is most common in turtles and crocodylids, but also occurs in tuatara and some other lizards. So, rather than genetic sex determination (GSD; like in humans,…
Who are you looking at?
by Bill Bateman & Trish Fleming. Animals are constantly on the lookout for potentially dangerous situations. Vigilance (time spent observing their environment for danger) is one measure of their antipredator responses. Another is their ‘flight initiation distance’ (simply: FID = how close you can come to an animal before they take off).
The ‘Risky-Decoy’ hypothesis
by Bill Bateman & Trish Fleming. If an ecologist asks you if you are good at modelling you might think that they are referring to something mathematical, and start running in the opposite direction. But a simpler kind of modelling is often used by behavioural ecologists who are interested in predation. If you wanted to…
Autotomy – just drop it and run
by Bill Bateman & Trish Fleming. An organism only has to fail once in escaping a predator for its evolutionary fitness to be reduced to zero. Selection to avoid ending up as a meal is, therefore, intense. More intense than selection on avoiding missing a meal such that in the evolutionary arms race, prey tends…
Life in the city: urban carnivores
by Bill Bateman & Trish Fleming. Our paper “Bateman P.W. & Fleming P.A. (2012). Review Article. Big city life: carnivores in urban environments. Journal of Zoology, 287, 1–23” has made it on to the list top cited papers of 2013 for Journal of Zoology. Obviously enough, it pleases us that our research is making an…
Welcome to Western WEB
Western Australian researchers have joined forces to create the WWEB. Working across urban, agricultural and natural landscapes, we investigate how animals respond to human presence, but can also contribute to our quality of life. We are wildlife biologists. Our research focuses on translational biology, where improving our understanding of the physiology and behaviour of vertebrates…
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