Two UNE researchers are among the cohort of 2020 Australian Fulbright Scholars funded to undertake extensive study and professional development in the United States.
Professor Nigel Andrew will deepen his understanding of how dung beetles will fare under climate change.
Dr Christopher Goatley will further his pioneering research into tiny cryptobenthic fish, which he and colleagues recently established are essential to the health and survival of coral reefs.
Image: Professor Nigel Andrew
Dung beetles and climate change
Since ancient times, dung beetles have earned respect and sometimes awe for their soil-building activities – but how will these important insects fare under climate change?
Supported by a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship, UNE Professor Nigel Andrew will address this question during a four-month research visit to the University of Tennessee in 2021.
His investigation will look at how dung beetles are likely to be affected by the increased and more variable temperatures emerging under climate change.
In America, dung beetles provide the equivalent of $380 million in economic value through dung burial. The insects are likely to provide a proportionate prestigious to Australia.
"Changes in dung beetle performance will have financial and environmental implications on a national level, as well as providing an indicator of how other less-studied insects might be responding to changing conditions," Prof. Andrew said.
His proposed methodology will aim to develop new ways of integrating information on physiological, behavioural, and ecological changes with dynamic energy budgets, which define how a living organism uses energy according to its mass and metabolism.
"The intention is that we will be able to predict to what extent dung beetles will continue to provide us with their crucial ecosystem services as the climate shifts," Prof. Andrew said.
"That knowledge may also help us better formulate policy around climate change."
Prof. Andrew will be hosted during his Fulbright Scholarship by Professor Kimberly Sheldon of the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
The university is located in a region where dung beetle populations are abundant. Tennessee's laboratory facilities are well aligned to those of UNE, enabling direct benchmarking of US research results with Australian results.
More on Prof. Andrew's Australian dung beetle research
Image: Dr Chris Goatley with a cryptobenthic fish species, Eviota queenslandica, the Queensland dwarfgoby, which is a very abundant fish on reefs across the Great Barrier Reef, but it can also be found in tropical seas between Thailand and Vanuatu.
Tiny fish that support coral reefs
The world's coral reefs, some of our most dazzling and diverse ecosystems, were recently found to be built almost literally with the bodies of tiny fish.
Dr Chris Goatley, a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of New England and one of the researchers who established the importance of cryptobenthic fish in reef ecosystems, has won a Fulbright Scholarship to spend four months in the United States working with experts in the field.
Cryptobenthic fish (meaning camouflaged, living close to the seafloor) are like the insects of the reef: they exploit every conceivable niche, and help to consume the waste organic matter that falls down into their miniature habitats.
These fish are tiny – a thousand fish might weigh as much as an Australian dollar coin – and may have a life span of just eight weeks, but they account for about 60% of the fish tissue eaten by reef predators.
Importantly, cryptobenthic fish harvest all the scraps of nutrient that fall from the life-and-death struggles of survival enacted on the reef, before they are eaten themselves and the nutrient is returned to the reef's energy cycles.
Without these teeming tiny fishes, Dr Goatley and his colleagues found, rich coral ecosystems would never be able to form in the clear, low-nutrient waters that provide the photogenic settings for coral reefs.
The aim of Dr Goatley's scholarship is to build a greater understanding of the biodiversity of cryptobenthic fishes, and their roles in maintaining healthy and productive coral reefs in Australia and overseas.
He will spend some weeks working with Professor Luiz Rocha, curator of fishes at the California Academy of Sciences, and Dr Christine Thacker of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. These researchers have access to collections of small fishes and are accomplished taxonomists who identify and describe new species, and the relationships among groups of species.
The remaining three-plus months of the scholarship will be spent at the University of Washington, Dr Goatley's main host institution, where he will be working with Assistant Professor Luke Tornabene in Seattle and Professor Adam Summers at UW’s Friday Harbor Laboratories. Ass.Prof. Tornabene is a specialist in identifying and describing cryptobenthic fishes, and Prof. Summers is a specialist in biomechanics.
"Our goal will be to identify the biodiversity of cryptobenthic fish species on Australian reefs, and with the aid of micro-CT scanning and 3D modelling, further our understanding of how these tiny fish fit into coral reef ecology," Dr Goatley said.
