Annual Report 2019
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PENRYN CAMPUS Kenya Beth Priday, Beth Priday, Centre for Ecology and Conservation Annual Report 2019 animal silhouettes border out of green? double page spread? montage? Welcome Marine Biology; Demography and Epidemiology; clusters and our homegrown and international Microbiology; Physiology; Systems Theory… the collaborations. Flick to the publications list list of these research clusters is long, and in each at the end of this report, to see just a small cluster we host several faculty members and subset of papers authored by faculty, postdocs, their research groups. We have no intention of postgrads and undergrads, alongside names of Centre for Ecology and Conservation: damaging the CEC’s established brand, but we collaborators from around the UK and around worked hard in 2019 to develop a substructure the world. The CEC is an amazing place to Making the most of an identity crisis of research clusters that will provide support work, learn and visit. Did I mention that we are As Director of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation, I’m incredibly proud that our ‘brand’ and collaborative opportunities for all our staff based on the coast, in Cornwall, surrounded by has reached a global audience, attracting scholars and collaborations from all over the world; and students. beaches, cliffs and moorland? That our university recruiting hundreds of undergraduate, masters and postgraduate research students with a is sector leading for its policies on inclusivity My job as Director of the CEC is not just to similarly international profile; and delivering education and research that has real global impact. and parental benefits? That we are acting on celebrate success but also to support all our The Academic Ranking of World Universities places the University of Exeter 7th in the world the Climate and Environment Emergency? That, staff and students to achieve their best, with (in the WORLD!) for the quality of its research in Ecology. That is real testament to the hard whatever Brexit brings, we will fight to maintain a focus on four pillars: research, education, our globality? That we are working through the work of members of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation and the Environment and collaboration and community. Science and Covid-19 global crisis and learning new ways Sustainability Institute on our Penryn Campus in Cornwall. education are performed by people, and the of working while physically distanced? Blimey. best performance is achieved by people who The Centre for Ecology and Conservation through research. The case studies held within Check us out online or, even better, and when are simultaneously contented AND challenged. continues to grow not just in reputation but also the pages of this annual report demonstrate this deemed safe to do so, come and see the CEC There’s probably a natural selection analogy to in size. We are about to reach 60 permanent breadth, describing… evolutionary biologists and for yourselves. be made here. As villages grow into towns and faculty; we host over 150 postgraduate molecular microbiologists collaborating to explain then cities, it can be difficult to maintain a sense researchers and nearly 100 postdoctoral the coevolution of hosts and their pathogens; of community and shared purpose. Success in researchers; and we share learning with nearly behavioural ecologists and mathematicians 2020 will be measured not just in the global 1,000 undergraduate and masters students, collaborating to explain the behaviour of bird reach of our research and education, but also in annually. It’s difficult to think of other universities flocks; conservation biologists and environmental the structures of support, mentorship, training, that host such an incredible concentration of scientists collaborating to describe the global collaboration, empathy and inclusivity that we whole-organism biologists. Yet, with this growth prevalence of microplastics in marine wildlife. foster in our Centre. and momentum comes an important challenge. Who are we and what is the Centre for Ecology So it’s clear that we do more than ecology So, yes we have grown, and rapidly. Yes, and Conservation? You have to stretch the and conservation. We also do Behaviour and this brings challenges and an identity crisis. definitions of ecology and conservation quite Cognition; Environmental Science; Evolutionary We will remain the Centre for Ecology and Professor Dave Hodgson wide to encompass the breadth of topics Dynamics and Theory; Sensory Biology; Conservation, but we will be writing next Director, Centre for Ecology and Conservation that we share through education and improve Movement and Migration; Human Sciences; year about the successes of our research Head of Department, CLES Cornwall Maia Jones, Hong Kong common frog populations have suffered catastrophic outbreaks of Plastic in Britain’s seals, ranavirosis, others have not exhibited any signs of the disease and their populations remain relatively stable. The drivers of these differences dolphins and whales in disease outcome, remain a puzzle. Here, we provide evidence for Microplastics have been systematic differences in the skin microbiome structure between Research Highlights found in the guts of every populations suffering from ranavirosis and those that are putatively marine mammal examined disease free. This research implicates skin-associated microbes as in a new study of animals important for determining disease outcome in both fungal and viral washed up on Britain’s pathogens. Understanding the relationship between skin microbiome and It’s dog eat dog Mob mentality rules shores. Researchers from disease severity in UK common frogs is vital for amphibian conservation. the University of Exeter It will allow us to predict the susceptibility of naïve populations to future on the canine jackdaw flocks and Plymouth Marine outbreaks of ranavirosis based on their skin microbiome composition, This paper by members of Alex Laboratory examined 50 and provide a vital foundation for the development of probiotic social ladder Thornton’s Wild Cognition Research animals from 10 species of Credit: Frazer Hodgkins Top dogs in a pack are known therapies to mitigate ranaviral infection in the wild. Published by Lewis Group, led by former MbyRes student dolphins, seals and whales – and found microplastics (less than 5mm) to assert their dominance, but Campbell, Trenton Garner, Kevin Hopkins, Amber Griffiths and Xavier Jenny Coomes, shows that jackdaws are Credit: Alan McCarthy in them all. Most of the particles (84%) were synthetic fibres – which scientists studying a group of free- Credit: Simona Cafazzo Harrison in Frontiers in Microbiology, 10:1245. more likely to join a mob to drive off predators if lots of their fellow can come from sources including clothes, fishing nets and toothbrushes roaming mongrels found high levels of aggression in the middle of the birds are up for the fight. Across many animal species, individuals come – while the rest were fragments, whose possible sources include food dominance hierarchy. Most theories predict more aggression higher up together to drive away threats, but the cognitive processes underlying packaging and plastic bottles. “It’s shocking – but not surprising – that the ladder. However, this research showed that when dogs were less such collective responses are poorly understood. As there is safety every animal had ingested microplastics,” said lead author Dr Sarah sure of their ranking relative to those around them, they tended to also Study reveals how in numbers, the team hypothesised that jackdaws might benefit from Nelms. “We don’t yet know what effects the microplastics, or the be involved in more aggressive interactions like biting and chasing. Rank assessing how many others are already involved in mobbing before chemicals on and in them, might have on marine mammals.” Though bacteria beat immune was hardest to predict in the middle of the hierarchy, which contained deciding whether to join. To test this, they recorded the anti-predator the animals in the study died of a variety of causes, those that died due younger individuals still establishing their dominance relationships with systems “scolding calls” of different individual jackdaws, and then broadcast to infectious diseases had a slightly higher number of particles than Humans and animals can, over time, each other. This led to high levels of aggression in the middle of the bouts of scolding featuring the calls of different numbers of individuals. those that died of injuries or other causes. “We can’t draw any firm develop resistance to the harmful hierarchy as well as at the top. Increased aggression can be costly for The jackdaws in the experiments always hear the same total number conclusions on the potential biological significance of this observation,” pathogens that infect them, or they can these individuals by increasing the risk of injuries or taking time away of scolding calls, but more birds flew in to join the mob if the calls had said Professor Brendan Godley. “We now have a benchmark that become resistant through the use of from other activities like feeding. The results confirm that these dogs been produced by multiple different individuals. These findings show future studies can be compared with.” Published by Sarah Nelms, antibiotics or vaccines. In turn, it is usually Credit: Geoff Hill have a similar age-graded hierarchy to wolves and reveal a potentially that jackdaws can tell one another’s voices apart to assess how many James Barnett, Andrew Brownlow, Nick Davison, Rob Deaville, Tamara assumed that pathogens will respond by evolving to multiply faster, unavoidable cost of climbing the social ladder. Published by Matthew Silk, birds are involved in a mob. Whereas collective behaviour in animals is Galloway, Penelope Lindeque, David Santillo and Brendan Godley in which will allow them to transmit faster to other hosts before they are Michael Cant, Simona Cafazzo, Eugenia Natoli and Robbie McDonald in generally assumed to be controlled by simple, fixed rules of interaction, Scientific Reports. cleared by the immune system of their current host. Such increased Proceedings of the Royal Society B.