Invertebrate Behaviour and Ecology Lab

Nature detectives in the backyard: 3 science activities for curious kids this summer Summer holidays are a great way to explore local nature. You can grow some slime moulds, become a pollinator analyst, or make caterpillars and find out who is hanging out in your backyard.

Today Caitlyn rounded out our representatives at the ESA conference with her talk "Testing the impact of Phantom Alternatives on floral choice by Bumblebees, Bombus impatiens". As the majority of talks were prerecorded it meant we could capture inception style moments of Caitlyn watching her own talk. It also meant she was able to ask herself questions and praise the quality of the presentation and the speaker.

Congratulations to all our speakers, and to everyone at the conference so far, the talks have been interesting, engaging, and informative.

Congratulations to our honours students Keeley Dart and Costa Theodore completing their final presentations for their honours. It's been a testing year and they've managed to create great works regardless AND presented great talks handling the questions like pros. These students are ready for the big leagues!

Well done to both of you and to celebrate here is a great picture from Costa's talk showing the d***y head of a larvae close up!
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/02/57/7b/02577b887af81d4cb24a35b904f90803.jpg

i.pinimg.com

We've got some great representation at the Ecological Society of Australia conference, two great talks today and a third tomorrow and the quality has been high.

Well done to our speakers, but also all the presenters who have given great engaging talks despite the challenges of this year and the saturation of zoom talks for us all!

Today
Yolanda Hanusch: Crops, weeds, and exotic insectary plants: beyond introduced bee benefits?
Manuel Lequerica: Diversity and abundance of urban hoverflies is associated with local–rather than landscape– scale attributes

Tomorrow
Caitlyn Forster: Testing the impact of Phantom Alternatives on floral choice by Bumblebees, Bombus impatiens

In a time of fake news it's fitting that we came across a paper on how inaccurate language in the media can negatively influence the understanding of the science being reported. This paper is creatively written with some interesting statements regarding the utility of metaphors in science communication.

As this paper was specifically about parasite-host relationships, we started looking at our own research to see where such language is having potentially negative impacts. The discussion about attributing personality to animals is always a contentious one, which reminded us of some pretty *interesting* papers on ants being young, lazy, and fat.... a dangerous misinterpretation of the role of repletes and extra workers utilised in particular situations.

Are there any misleading terms used in your research? Or is there some media reported science you have believed to be true but perhaps question it deep down as it sounds a little too good to be true, or a little sensationalised?
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2020.1081

When fiction becomes fact: exaggerating host manipulation by parasites | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences In an era where some find fake news around every corner, the use of sensationalism has inevitably found its way into the scientific literature. This is especially the case for host manipulation by ...

As agreed upon by our lab members, this is perhaps the most beautiful cockroach that we've seen. It also seems these cockroaches (of the Melyroidea group) wanted to be ants when it comes to their social behaviour.

This weeks discussion paper elaborated on an enigmatic species of cockroach that demonstrates a eusocial life strategy. That is, much like ants, they have a queen, works, live in a large nest, and work together to tend the young. This is the first known example of a cockroach to do this, though I'm sure some renters in "interesting" suburbs may claim different with their local infestations!

Read more below, and a news article follows
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00114-020-01694-x

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2256067-cockroach-species-found-to-live-like-ants-with-workers-and-a-queen/

Neotropical Melyroidea group cockroaches reveal various degrees of (eu)sociality Eusociality in its various degrees represents an animal social system characterised by cooperative brood care, differentiation into castes and generational overlap. The fossil record indicates that eusociality is likely to have originated in hymenopterans and blattodeans during the Cretaceous. In th...

Yay! Well done everyone who entered, some truly amazing videos, and big congratulations to Francisco!

Congratulations Francisco for winning the visualise your thesis competition! A really nice video on how far native bees will fly for love 💕

Are you looking for some late night/early morning bug action? Check out the North Carolina Museum of Natural History's BugFest! The pros of a pandemic, so much has gone virtual and free making science and knowledge more accessible than before! Check it out and then check out which invertebrates are hanging out in your backyard!

https://naturalsciences.org/calendar/bugfest/

BugFest: A Virtual Infestation! | Programs and Events Calendar This year BugFest will go online … a Virtual Infestation! Join us as we interact with entomologists from North Carolina and around the world to learn about the fascinating world of bugs. We will have SIX days of buggy adventures as we celebrate our theme arthropod … THE FLY!

Next up is a wonderful piece on the not so well known Australian pollinators, the hoverfly! Seems the don't mind the inner-city life, nor do they mind the winters! Another great piece from our lab member Manuel. Don't forget to vote if you have a usyd email address. https://digital.library.sydney.edu.au/assets/show/2/ece77f0b5d19c2d15edb50a0b5b7e56e15973829431084_master.mp4

digital.library.sydney.edu.au

First up, a beautiful entry from Francisco Garcia Bulle Bueno! Francisco has been finding out more and more about the adorable native Australian bee, Tetragonula carbonaria, also known as the sugar bag bee. Check out some of his research in 60 seconds!
https://digital.library.sydney.edu.au/assets/show/2/c4c6ca887514363c3a42c09d5673a3b915972889523435_master.mp4

digital.library.sydney.edu.au

Visualise your thesis is on again! This is an international competition that challenges graduate researchers to summarise their research in an engaging, 60-second visual multimedia presentation. This year we have two students from our lab with, frankly incredible entries! If you have a usyd email address you can vote for your favourite, we'll be sharing the videos from our students but check out the others in the competition, the calibre is high! https://digital.library.sydney.edu.au/nodes/view/7669

Visualise Your Thesis Competition Entries Read the full record details for Collection: Visualise Your Thesis Competition Entries

Congratulations to PhD student Francisco for his native bee publication on sterility in Tetragonula carbonaria workers and the high-volume egg production of their queens!

His work has been incredibly interesting and helping us to learn more and more about a system that still has so many secrets to discover!

Is there anything you wanted to know about the native bees?
https://jeb.biologists.org/content/early/2020/07/29/jeb.230599

Irreversible sterility of workers and high-volume egg production by queens in the stingless bee Tetragonula carbonaria Social insects are characterised by a reproductive division of labour between queens and workers. However, in the majority of social insect species the workers are only facultatively sterile. The Australian stingless bee Tetragonula carbonaria is noteworthy as workers never lay eggs. Here we describ...

How much do you know about ants? A fun little 2 min quiz, how'd you do?

Ants are everywhere in Australia, but how much do you actually know about them? Take the quiz Ants can be faster than an Olympic sprinter, crazier than a cut snake, ferocious and delicious. And you'll have to be all this and more to get 10/10 on this ant quiz.

Tune in to ABC Sydney Drive this afternoon with Richard Glover to hear his chat with lablette Eliza about the devastating and somewhat invisible loss of invertebrates during this bush fire season.

The bushfires across Australia and devastating and it'll be months, possibly even years before we truly understand what we've lost - the lives, the properties, and the wildlife, truly heartbreaking.

This little piece from our leader is a reminder of some of the smaller endemic species we may have lost forever with the extent and ferocity of these fires. Hopefully it is not as bad as we fear but it'll be weeks until we can begin assessing the extent of the damage.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/science/australia-fire-ecology-insects.html

Some of Australia’s Smallest Species Could Be Lost to Wildfires Velvet worms, trapdoor spiders: Scientists worry about the fate of the nation’s many remarkable, overlooked endemic creatures.

NOMAD climbing gym

When new queens enter a colony of stingless bees there is only one chosen one. The rejected girls then hang out at the bin, sad, ignored by the others, waiting for death. Francisco showed us some of his great PhD research at today's meeting.

When you're stuck in traffic driving the long way to the place you want to go but can see an off-roading shortcut would you want to take it? Turns out the Australian meat ants take shortcuts when they're faced with a long detour, choosing to cut a path instead of taking the long way around.

Check out our collaboration with Felix and Tomer at Universität Regensburg

https://jeb.biologists.org/content/222/21/jeb205773

Access denied | jeb.biologists.org used Cloudflare to restrict access

Listen in and itch away!

Self Improvement: Invertebrates that share our bodies The bugs that right now could be stuck on you! Take a listen to this week's Halloween inspired self improvement with Eliza Middleton from the University of Sydney.

Tune in to ABC radio this afternoon for Drive. Our lab manager Eliza will be chatting with Richard Glover about the invertebrates that share our bodies... Be prepared to get a bit itchy!

It's been a big week here at the Latty Lab! We've welcomed our new Postdoc Theo and farewelled our research assistant Rebecca - with some blue velvet worm cupcakes of course! Looking forward to exciting works with Theo and thank you Becky for all your work over the last year - we wish you all the best and know we'll be seeing you around the lab soon!

Our PhD student Amelie is off on an amazing adventure, a year living and researching in Japan! We're so excited to see what she discovers during her time there. Can't wait for the updates!

Our Honours student, Tia, presented her final seminar today talking about social behaviour in velvet worms! Her work found that there are larger groups of her species of velvet worms in short logs with large diameters with a decent amount of degradation. She also found that members in large groups had lots of size variation.

Yesterday we got caught up in a great discussion about how ecological systems are complex systems (think of food webs and population fluctuations), but that there are many nuances to ecological systems that are often forgotten when defining a complex system. These forgotten aspects, such as cross-scale interactions and environmental "memory" (think seed banks left in the soil for years before finally sprouting later due to a fire event for example), are important interactions whose contribution is being underestimated. For complex system science, a growing, fascinating and useful area of research, to be applied to it's full potential in understanding the dynamics of ecological systems, these intricacies of ecology need to be understood and incorporated. An interesting challenge.

Kudos to the authors, btw, figure 1 is really cool and helpful in understanding how we can figure out random and non-random patterns, and how complexity can arise from randomness.
https://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/2/3/395

Ecological Systems as Complex Systems: Challenges for an Emerging Science Complex systems science has contributed to our understanding of ecology in important areas such as food webs, patch dynamics and population fluctuations. This has been achieved through the use of simple measures that can capture the difference between order and disorder and simple models with local....

Did you miss Eliza and Richard's chat yesterday? Don't worry, you can catch it below!

Self Improvement: Insect Mimics Mimicry is a survival strategy used across the animal world. Take a listen to this week's lesson on how insects specialise in mimicry, your teacher is Dr Eliza Middleton from the University of Sydney.

Got plans this Wednesday afternoon? Looking for something to listen to and maybe learn something new? Our lab manager, Eliza, will be back on ABC Radio Drive with Richard Glover for Self-Improvement Wednesday. This week she'll be talking about mimicry! Tune in.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/27yl8s/this_is_a_caterpillar_not_a_snake_xpost_rwtf/

Check out this great video representing Manuel's PhD work in 60 seconds! This is his entry to the Visualise Your Thesis competition and we think it's pretty magnificent.

There are some amazing videos of the PhD research happening at the University of Sydney, check them out and vote for your favourite!
https://news.library.sydney.edu.au/visualise-your-thesis-2019/

Urban Syrphid Flies By Manuel Lequerica - 2019 Visualise your Thesis The Ecology, Behaviour, and Evolution of Urban Syrphid Flies (Diptera: Syrphidae) Presented by Manuel Lequerica PhD (Year 2). School of Life and Environmenta...

How's your mental health? Did you know students and academics are more prone to depression and anxiety than the general population? This is a topic we discussed at our mental health check-in this week for the lab meeting.
Do you know what supports are available from your institution?
One comment to come from today's chat is that whilst students may be open with their supervisors regarding mental health issues, they are unlikely to approach them when they are experiencing trouble.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4089

Evidence for a mental health crisis in graduate education With mental illness a growing concern within graduate education, data from a new survey should prompt both academia and policy makers to consider intervention strategies.

At this weeks lab meeting we discussed this great review of path integration and the potential neural mechanisms involved.

Interestingly, a lot of neural data has come from Drosophila studies. We were thinking that there must be enough knowledge of honeybee brains, that the link between the known navigational behaviours of honeybees and their neural biology could be examined directly?

This paper also reminded us once again that invertebrates are capable of such amazing feats, such as the waggle dance in honeybees; translating horizontal directions to a vertical surface and compensating for the changing position of the sun! So impressive.

https://jeb.biologists.org/content/222/11/jeb205187.abstract