Geometric biology allows us to understand the dynamics of how living things convert energy flows into mass, at all scales of biological organisation.
The size and shape (together, the ‘geometry’) of organisms ultimately determine these flows.
The Geometric Theory of Biology allows us to predict how things function, grow, and change; be they tumours, schools of fish, or whole forests.
Centre members Dustin Marshall, Keyne Monro, Amanda Pettersen and Hayley Cameron are currently attending Evolution 2017 in Portland, Oregon.
Results from Hayley Cameron’s latest PhD research do not support the assumptions of bet hedging theory, and are soon to be published in the influential journal, Ecology Letters.
Today postdocs Martino Malerba and Giulia Ghedini spent the day investigating if the size of algal cells will affect the grazing rates and total amount ingested for the filter feeding bryozoan Bugula neritina.
PhD student Marcelo Lagos, under the supervision of the Centre’s Dustin Marshall and Craig White, compared mass-specific metabolic rates in native and introduced organisms, across 14 species and two phyla. His findings suggest systematic differences in metabolic rate have evolved in response to the selection pressures on invasive species.
The Centre’s Craig White and colleague Lewis Halsey (University of Roehampton) examined the effect of body size on the energetics of going up hills, and if it changes when data is included that looks at the animal’s net cost of transport.
The Centre’s Craig White and colleagues Pieter Arnold and Phillip Cassey used an invasive insect species, the red flour beetle, as a model to investigate how movement characteristics related to morphological and physiological traits.
Congratulations to Karin Svanfeldt who recently submitted her PhD and has published some of that research in The Journal of Animal Ecology, with her supervisors, Keyne Monro and Dustin Marshall.
Marcelo Lagos and Diego Barneche tested whether invasive species are able to maintain higher levels of aerobic metabolism under lower oxygen conditions, such as those present at artificial structures like piers, jetties and marinas.
Dustin Marshall and Hayley Cameron are returning to Oxford this month to finalise a project they have been working on with Tim Coulson from the Zoology Department at the University of Oxford, as well as re-visit some favourite haunts, including the famous Eagle and Child pub and University Parks.
Colin Olito and Diego Barneche have developed LoLinR (local linear regression): a suite of simple functions to carry out local linear regressions to estimate monotonic rates from time series data. Importantly, their methodology provides a statistically robust and reproducible approach to estimating monotonic rates from noisy time series data.
Published in Global Change Biology.
