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Biomarkers Of Animal Health: Integrating Nutritional Ecology, Endocrine Ecophysiology, Ecoimmunology, And Geospatial Ecology, Robin Warne, Glenn Proudfoot, Erica Crespi Jan 2015

Biomarkers Of Animal Health: Integrating Nutritional Ecology, Endocrine Ecophysiology, Ecoimmunology, And Geospatial Ecology, Robin Warne, Glenn Proudfoot, Erica Crespi

Publications

Diverse biomarkers including stable isotope, hormonal, and ecoimmunological assays are powerful tools to assess animal condition. However, an integrative approach is necessary to provide the context essential to understanding how biomarkers reveal animal health in varied ecological conditions. A barrier to such integration is a general lack of awareness of how shared extraction methods from across fields can provide material from the same animal tissues for diverse biomarker assays. In addition, the use of shared methods for extracting differing tissue fractions can also provide biomarkers for how animal health varies across time. Specifically, no study has explicitly illustrated the depth …


Evolution And Ecology Of Two Iconic Australian Clades: The Meliphagidae (Birds) And The Hakeinae (Plants), Eliot Trimarchi Miller Jan 2015

Evolution And Ecology Of Two Iconic Australian Clades: The Meliphagidae (Birds) And The Hakeinae (Plants), Eliot Trimarchi Miller

Dissertations

The first part of this dissertation explores the evolution of two iconic groups of species through Australian climate space: the Meliphagidae, or honeyeaters, which are primarily nectar-feeding birds, and the Hakeinae, a section of the plant family Proteaceae. Both groups are inferred to have had their origins in Gondwanan rainforests that were widespread across Australia 45 million years ago and then diversified into more arid environments as the continent’s climate became more arid. Accordingly, dry environments are inhabited by closely related (phylogenetically clustered) sets of species, although, in contrast to the honeyeaters, Hakeinae communities are characterized by more localized diversification. …


The Biology Of Fun: Do Birds Just Want To Have A Good Time?, Carley J. Langley, Jonathan R. Moore Jan 2015

The Biology Of Fun: Do Birds Just Want To Have A Good Time?, Carley J. Langley, Jonathan R. Moore

Undergraduate Research Posters

The intention of this research project was to delve into the ecological study of playfulness and what appears to be fun in a broad range of bird species. (1) Do all birds exhibit playfulness and use fun? And if so, (2) how have these behaviors contributed to their evolutionary success? Past research has already been underway to biological define what constitutes both “fun” and “play” in animal species. In the past the majority of all test subjects have been mammals, however in the past decade (and especially in the past five years) other vertebrate species such as birds are beginning …