Anna MacDonaldI'm a biologist with interests in genetics, conservation, ecology, invasive species, and wildlife management. Archives
May 2019
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This is my first post here since April. I’ve spent much of the last three months travelling, holidaying, workshopping and attending two conferences. I had a wonderful time in Adelaide at the Genetics Society of AustralAsia’s 2015 conference and learned about some fascinating new science at the Boden Reseach Conference on Comparative Animal Genomics. But what I thought I’d write about here is the week I spent in Białowieża in Poland, for the 2015 Metabarcoding Spring School (#metabar2015 on Twitter). This was organised by the metabarcoding.org team, in conjunction with the Mammal Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Apart from being a chance to meet lots of new people and spend time in an amazing part of the world, I also learned a great deal. The perfect mixture! There’s no way I can report back on everything here (and in a coincidence of timing, this overview has just been published), so I’ll outline some of the key issues discussed at the workshop and provide links to relevant papers for those who want to learn more.
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I know a lot of biologists who have lists related to their work: lists of birds they have seen, lists of journals they want to publish in, lists of top wildlife spectacles they want to see, lists of species they have studied, lists of their favourite fieldwork sites. I too have a few lists, and in writing this post I’m thinking of one list in particular: my list of the most disgusting batches of tissue samples I have ever had the misfortune to extract DNA from. It is a short but memorable list, which, as of this week, stands at four entries. And despite the large number of scat DNA samples I have worked with over the years, there are no faeces on that list! I thought it was going to be a routine afternoon in the lab. I was planning to take subsamples from some roadkilled mammal ear tissues we had been sent. Roadkills can be a valuable non-invasive source of population genetic information for many species. The procedure goes something like this: take a 2mm subsample of tissue, finely chop it with a scalpel and forceps, and transfer the tissue to a tube with lysis buffer to incubate overnight. I had 48 samples to prepare, so was expecting to spend a couple of hours in the lab, then finish the DNA extractions the next morning. That was the plan…
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It was about 4am on a dark Tasmanian morning and I was heading for Hobart airport for a 6am flight. I was driving along twisting country roads, taking it easy for the sake of ambush wombats and my rental car excess. Rounding a corner I saw a movement on the road, I saw spots, white on brown covering the body and tail, and I just had time for a glimpse of the whole creature as it turned to run for the bushes. And that was it! My first ever glimpse of a wild quoll! Several years would pass before my next, also in Tasmania, this time a female eastern quoll and her four half-grown young. Although two species of quoll still persist in Tasmania, they are no longer common near Canberra where I live. In fact, despite their former abundance, quolls are in decline across much of Australia, and conservation of these native marsupial predators and their ecological roles is paramount. As native predators such as quolls have disappeared from the Australian landscape, they have been replaced by introduced species. This is no coincidence: there is good evidence that cats and foxes have negative impacts on quolls, as well as many other Australian animals. So, if cats are bad for Australia, but quolls are good, what can we do to reduce the impacts of cats, and promote quoll conservation?
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If you open a few recent journals with a focus on conservation or ecology, the chances are that you won’t be too far away from a paper that uses environmental DNA (eDNA). In fact, Biological Conservation currently has a special issue on environmental DNA as a tool for conservation, which I’ve added to my reading list for #365papers. Genetics has been a handy tool for conservationists for a few decades now, and since the 1990s non-invasive genetic analyses, have become increasingly common. More recently, the revolution in high throughput and massively parallel DNA sequencing technologies has allowed us to tackle questions that were thought impossible even just a few years ago, including complex investigations of mixed environmental samples. You can measure biodiversity from the DNA in a soil or water sample. You can study the diets of cryptic predators through genetic analysis of their faeces. It’s all very exciting!
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Today, 26th January, is Australia Day. This is Australia’s national holiday, marking the arrival on this day in 1788 of the British First Fleet at Port Jackson in New South Wales. Of course one might wonder whether the anniversary of the proclamation of British sovereignty over eastern Australia is an appropriate date to celebrate Australian unity and culture. No one can deny that indigenous Australian communities have suffered – and are still suffering – extreme hardships following the establishment of British rule on this continent, and 26th January has other names: “Invasion Day”, “Survival Day”, “Day of Mourning”… This topic is not my field of expertise so I won’t expand further, but I encourage you to learn more about different perspectives here, here, here, here, here, here and here. What I do want to write about today is biodiversity and conservation in Australia, and the status of Australian wildlife in the society that has developed in the 227 years since January 26th 1788. Unfortunately I don’t think there is too much to celebrate...
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Today’s post is prompted by a conversation I had with a man I sometimes see at the local dog park. Early one morning a few weeks ago, while our pooches played, we discussed species concepts. This man expressed his frustration at his biologist friends’ constant efforts to describe and delimit species. This obsession with naming and renaming was a mystery to him, and he thinks it a waste of effort. To paraphrase him: so mistakes were made in the past, but surely now we can just all agree to accept the status quo and refrain from splitting and merging and reclassifying any more species. And if we discover something new, well, if two groups of individuals can interbreed then they are the same species and if they can’t interbreed then they are different species, right? Except that it’s not quite that simple.
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“Bob said I should call you because it would be good to do some genetics on this mammal population, how long will that take…?” “Alice and I collected a few tissue samples when we were in the field earlier this year and now we’d like to talk to you about collaborating on some DNA analysis…” I’m paraphrasing of course, but I’ve heard variants of these numerous times over the last decade or so. I’ve also met many people with a passion for ecology and conservation who have wanted to learn more about genetics as it applies to their research. Which is great! DNA can be a wonderful tool with great potential to contribute to wildlife conservation and management. As DNA sequencing technologies advance, genetic analysis has become both more affordable and more accessible to people who study non–model organisms (i.e. most of the world’s wildlife!).
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Earlier this year I spent two weeks walking in picturesque Tasmania, eyes fixed firmly to the floor, looking for poo to collect. Other times I’ve searched beneath rocks in high country paddocks for endangered lizards, or driven over 400 kms with a cargo of wallaby sperm destined for our lab freezers. And I get paid to do this! When I meet new people they often comment on how interesting my work sounds, usually followed by “and how on earth did you end up doing that anyway?”. So in my first post for WildlifeSNPits I thought that, by way of introduction, I’d write about some of the things that have inspired me to follow this career path. Of course not all of us are excited by the same things, so I’d also like to learn about your sources of inspiration…
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WildlifeSNPits posts24/3/2015 I'd like to keep track of all of my blog posts in one place, so this is just to note that I'm going to use this site to share links to my posts elsewhere, especially those I write at WildlifeSNPits.
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Now blogging at WildlifeSNPits19/1/2015 Just a quick post to share that I've recently joined the blogging team at WildlifeSNPits! We're a group of early-mid career researchers with interests in conservation, evolution and genetics. If you're interested in these topics, or science outreach, education, and policy, then check us out.
I will still use this page for the occasional personal update, but it's likely to be irregular :) |