Why are some snakes more venomous than others? When did plate tectonics begin? What geological mysteries await our discovery on Mars? How do organisms build their own bodies? How do businesses manage biodiversity?
These are just some of the interesting and diverse Lightning Talks which were presented at a recent event in the School of Natural Sciences. Researchers from the disciplines of Botany, Geology, Geography and Zoology had just two minutes to present their work to colleagues and friends. The strict format created an interesting evening filled with bite-size chunks of science.
We were very lucky to have a great judging panel comprised of Professor Fraser Mitchell (Head of School), Donal Daly (Senior Scientific Officer at the EPA), Thomas Deane (Press Officer for Engineering, Maths and Science), Aoibheann Bird (Education and Outreach manager, Insight Centre for Data Analytics) and Diane McSweeney (Education team at the Science Gallery). The speakers were judged on their content, delivery and use of props. Prizes were kindly sponsored by the Trinity Foundation, the Science Gallery, the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland and the Graduate Student’s Union.
It was a great evening filled with lots of interesting talks and a good chance to find out about the diverse research in the School. Thanks to the fantastic organising committee: Jane Stout, Maria Long, Frances Leogue, Rachel Kavanagh, Tara Kelly, Clare Stead and Alwynne McGeever for making everything run so smoothly!
Our photography competition is still open to entries (deadline 10th November). Submit one photograph to the album here. Log in with the username ecoevoblog and password which is the same. Remember, don’t give it a name that will reveal the photographer so as to avoid bias. Good luck!
I thought it would be a nice idea to have the occasional photography contest on the blog. So starting today and running until Monday 10th November anyone can submit one photograph to this album here. Just log in with username ecoevoblog and password is the same. Don’t make it obvious that it’s your image in case it biases the judge. The theme for this month will be ‘Changing Seasons’. Prizes will be determined in due course. I just want to say good luck. We’re all counting on you.
EcoEvo@TCD was awarded Best Science & Technology Blog in Ireland at the Blog Awards ceremony on Saturday. Thanks to everyone who has contributed posts over the past couple of years. It’s nice to know that we’ve put some good thoughts down on paper! Keep the posts coming.
This Friday, members of EcoEvo@TCD, as well as others from the Botany and Zoology departments and Trinity Centre for Biodiversity Research will present Night Life! in the Zoology building at Trinity College Dublin. The event is FREE to attend and we will be open from 6pm-10pm with the last entry at 9.30pm.
Night Life! is an opportunity to meet researchers and to find out the kinds of things we do. Prof. Yvonne Buckley will give you a taste of our research highlights, Kevin Healy will wow you with his research on snake venom (yes there will be snakes!), Sive Finlay will perplex you with the mysteries of tenrec evolution (if you don’t know what they are, come along and find out, they’re really cute!), Sean Kelly will explain how he discovers new bird species in Indonesia, Deirdre McClean will reveal the fascinating social lives of microbes, Thomas Guillerme will dazzle you with the lasers on his 3D scanner and the jaws of a shark, Claire Shea will amaze you by explaining why babies kick in the womb, Adam Kane will intrigue you with models of T.rex and maybe some vultures, and other students will be available to answer your burning questions about biology, evolution and ecology. So if you’re at a loose end on Friday night, come along and say hi!
Night Life! forms just one part of Discover Research Dublin, an annual event funded by the European Commission as part of European Researchers’ Night. The event is hosted by Trinity College Dublin, in partnership with the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. As well as Night Life! the evening will feature over 50 fun, interactive and free events and activities which will give you direct contact with researchers and allow for discovery, questions and participation. The event aims to challenge perceptions about researchers and show the creativity and innovation that exists in research across all disciplines. Activities are grouped under four broad themes – Body Parts, Creativity in Research, Meet the Researchers and Living Thought/Thinking Life.
We encourage you to visit, explore, discover and enjoy!
Author: Natalie Cooper, @nhcooper123 Image: Kevin Healy, @healyke
We’ve already kicked off the year with our second annual NERD club AGM. It was a great opportunity to discuss what we covered throughout the year and to make plans for the months ahead. (For the uninitiated, NERD club is our networks in ecology/evolution research discussion group but feel free to think of it in the true sense of the word too).
Here’s our NERD club prize winners for 2013/14
Best session: Paul for his talk on carnivory in plants
Best PI called Andrew: What is Andrew Jackson? (No-one knows!)
We’ve had some excellent sessions about transferable skills, how to navigate the perils of academia and great discussions and collaborations on current research projects. We’ve got lots more interesting topics planned for the year ahead which will definitely make an appearance on EcoEvo@TCD.
It’s also been a very successful year for our blog. We had a winner at the ABSW science writers awards and two semi-finalists in another international blog competition. We’re also on the short list for the best science and technology blog in the Irish blog awards.
So whether you’re packing away your fieldwork gear after another season, dreading the darker evenings or sharpening your pencils for another academic year, rest assured that you can look forward to some more ecology and evolution- related musings from the EcoEvo@TCD team.
We’ve had another fantastic year at EcoEvo@TCD. We’ve published some high profilepapers and brought back tales from our fieldwork experiences. We’ve learned how to navigate some of the perils of academia and thoroughly enjoyed hosting an excellent series of seminar speakers.
Now EcoEvo@TCD will be taking a short break over the summer so we won’t be updating the blog over July and August. We’re currently in the midst of another conference season, presenting our research at various international meetings and learning about the latest cool scientific research. Add that to some exciting travels and summer science projects and we’ll have plenty of stories to tell.
When we get back we’ll report on the highlights of conference season and bring you more ecology and evolution related news, views and advice.
We hope you have a wonderful summer. See you in September!
Author: Sive Finlay, sfinlay[at]tcd.ie, @SiveFinlay
We’re delighted that one of our regular EcoEvo@TCD writers, Sarah Hearne (@SarahVHearne) has won a prize from the Association for British Science Writers. Sarah won first place in the new Good Thinking student science blog category for her piece, Sea Serpents off the Port Bow! published in November last year. These prestigious awards recognise excellence in scientific journalism and writing from both students and professionals and it’s a great achievement to have been singled out among such stiff competition.
I posted previously about my PhD research studying bird populations from the tropical and biodiversity-rich region of Sulawesi, Indonesia. I am happy to announce that the first paper as part of this research has just been published in the open access journal PLOS ONE. To read the full paper for free, click here. This work is a collaborative effort from staff in the Department of Zoology in Trinity College Dublin and Haluoleo University in Sulawesi. Here, I’d like to discuss the wider importance of the findings of this study.
My current research focuses on bird populations from peninsular South-east Sulawesi and the nearby Wakatobi Islands. The main focus of this paper was to reassess the taxonomic status of a population of birds from the Wakatobi Islands (i.e. whether these birds represent a species or subspecies). The birds in question belong to the flowerpecker family (Dicaeidae); a group of small and colourful, arboreal passerines found from Southeast Asia to Australia. The Wakatobi birds were originally described as a separate species (Dicaeum kuehni) from those on mainland Sulawesi by the renowned avian taxonomist Ernst J. Hartert. However, for reasons that remain unclear in the literature, the Wakatobi birds were later reclassified as a subspecies of the Grey-sided Flowerpecker (Dicaeum celebicum) from mainland Sulawesi. Therefore we decided the Wakatobi populations were deserving of reassessment. From comparisons of plumage and morphology (that is, the measurement of various features such as a bird’s wing and bill), as well as estimates of genetic divergence and phylogenetic relationships between Wakatobi and Sulawesi populations, our results suggest the Wakatobi birds deserve to be recognised as a distinct species. We have therefore recommended the Wakatobi populations be reclassified as Dicaeum kuehni, a species found only on the Wakatobi archipelago and put forward the common name ‘Wakatobi Flowerpecker’. For more detailed methods and results check out the paper.
“So what?”, you might say. Well, despite centuries of work from naturalists aiming to estimate the number of different species that exist or have existed on Earth (be they animal, plant, fungus, bacteria, etc) and further understand their evolutionary relationships, we still have a lot to learn! Therefore, this research adds another tiny piece to this enormous and incomplete jigsaw. Through a greater understanding of life on Earth we can attempt to answer some of the great philosophical questions, such as ‘Where and how did life start?’; ‘How and why do new species appear?’; ‘Why has life evolved to become as it is today?’; and ‘How have we, as humans, come to be?’. Anyway, let’s be honest, who doesn’t enjoy learning of a recently discovered species or simply one they haven’t heard of before (be they as cute as the recently discovered olinguito or as frighteningly ugly as the goblin shark)? But the endeavour to discover species and classify and quantify the diversity on life on Earth brings us much more than entertainment and endless fascination, it also has very practical applications. Data on the distribution and conservation status of species are one of the major sources of information used to inform conservation policy. Therefore, as we are in the midst of an extinction crisis, it is vital that these data are accurate.
In order to maximise our understanding biodiversity, particularly in the remote and poorly known Sulawesi region of Indonesia, we require multi-disciplinary research. For example, take a look at Figure 1 below. On the left are a male (above) and a female (below) Grey-sided Flowerpecker from mainland Sulawesi. On the right are a male (above) and a female (below) Wakatobi Flowerpecker. They look very similar, right? This is true. However there are subtle but consistent differences in plumage between the species (again, see the paper for more info on this). Without the collection of detailed morphological data and the generation of genetic sequences, we may have incorrectly concluded that these make up just one species, when in fact they are morphologically distinct, reproductively isolated and genetically very different. This demonstrates the need for modern research, not just in Sulawesi, but globally, to employ integrative research, combining traditional comparisons of colour, size and shape with modern genetic and phylogenetic analyses.
Figure 1. A comparison of plumage characteristics between male (top row) and female (bottom row) Grey-sided Flowerpeckers (left) and Wakatobi Flowerpeckers (right).
Despite the knowledge that the Sulawesi region is home to a large number of remarkable birds that are found nowhere else in the world, it has remained relatively poorly studied. Furthermore, there has been a lack of integrative ornithological research in the area and very little genetic sampling. Therefore, it is likely that avian species richness for the Sulawesi region is underestimated and that numerous bird species are awaiting description. On top of this, Sulawesi’s biodiversity is facing major threats from a rapidly expanding human population and mass habitat destruction, among other things. Unless we can encourage more multi-disciplinary research within the region, we will likely fail to recognise evolutionarily distinct lineages and run the risk of losing them forever.
Our current findings inspire many further questions. For example, why have the flowerpeckers on the Wakatobi islands become so different to their close relatives on mainland Sulawesi? In other words, what are the evolutionary pressures that have driven the divergence of the Wakatobi Flowerpeckers? By investigating these questions, we hope to learn more about the evolutionary processes of speciation and adaptation to living on islands. As the Wakatobi Flowerpecker is found only on the Wakatobi Islands, the protection status afforded to the islands may require reassessment. Furthermore, considering one unique bird species has evolved on the Wakatobi, could there be more? Watch this space.
Author and Images: Seán Kelly, kellys17[at]tcd.ie, @seankelly999
Between the 1st and 2nd of May several members of the Trinity Centre for Biodiversity Research got their game faces on for the inaugural Intervarsity BioBlitz Challenge. For the first time the Trinity fox and co were pitted against the best biodiversity on offer from the DCU, NUI Galway and UCC campuses.
The stakes were high but the goal was simple; identify more species on campus then any other college in a 24 hour period and become the first college biodiversity champion of Ireland!
Kicking off Trinity’s effort to win the championship the birdwatchers were up bright and early to catch the dawn course. With 19 species identified it was the Sparrow hawk that caught the eye (but evaded the camera lens) of our inner city campus birds.
While the birders were digesting their findings some early morning pond dipping was throwing up its own surprises with a three-spined stickleback found in what looked an inhospitable pool out the back of the Zoology Department.
The unlikely source of our only campus fish, the three-spined stickleback
Meanwhile in the more hospitable setting of Trinity’s own little secret garden some black ants were having a midday honeydew snack from their aphid herd during our plant identification walk.
The ant in focus is feeding on sugary secretions from the aphid, which benefits from the ants’ protection in return.
Although many of the 32 species of invertebrates were found amongst the plants and pools, it was in the nooks and crannies of various building walls that Trinity’s diversity of arachnids, such as the snakes back spider, were found to reside.
While many volunteers were out rummaging in the leaf litter, Rachel Kavanagh was busy coordinating efforts at the central hub in the Science Gallery. There were also some inquisitive guests from St. Mary’s Boys school learning about pollinators with Green Bee Education.
Students from St. Mary’s Boys school building solitary bee shelters.
As the day passed-by collecting and identifying specimens the deadline quickly approached and results were coming in. Galway won with a massive 581 species, with Cork on 451 leaving the race to avoid the wooden spoon between the Dublin Campuses. Unfortunately despite the heroic efforts of everyone, especially the botanists who identified 245 species of plants, Trinity could not avoid the dubious wooden spoon award, finishing with 346 and losing by just 27 species.
However while we didn’t win their was plenty of consolation prizes to be found as @EndangeredDAVE left some postcards and paintings of endangered Irish species in various spots around campus.
One of the many beautiful pictures distributed around campus by @EndangeredDave.
With an impressive 346 species recorded in an inner city campus and an incredible increase on previous years (16 species in 2012 and 126 species in 2013) TCD’s form is only on the up with the Trinity fox looking to be the top dog in next year’s event.
Look out for bioblitz events near you this weekend!
Author and Images: Kevin Healy, healyke[at]tcd.ie, @healyke
Our 
EcoEvo@TCD was awarded Best Science & Technology Blog in Ireland at the 
