Author: emilyroycroft

The fourth paper from my PhD came out last week in PNAS, see the published paper here. Our findings got a little bit of media attention, with the revelation that Gould’s mouse is not extinct! I wrote an article in The Conversation that details our findings;
This adorable mouse was considered extinct for over 100 years — until we found it hiding in plain sight

You could also follow this link to hear me talking with ABC Radio‘s Paul Turton about the discovery, or read about it in ABC News: Gould’s mouse was declared extinct, but DNA tells another tale

Gould’s mouse/Djoongari also starred in a variety of other media outlets, including The Guardian, Canberra Times, CNN, The Times UK, New Scientist, Cosmos Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, VICE, 7news, About Regional, The Daily Mail, Yahoo News, CNET, IFLScience, as well as numerous local Australian and international outlets, see more here. It was great to see our special native rodents get a bit of well-deserved publicity.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our world in many different ways this year. For academics, one of those ways has been the cancellation of all in-person international conferences for 2020. In the face of lingering global uncertainty, some 2021 conferences have already been cancelled too.

Although cancelling was completely necessary, it was a little sad to realise that my next 12 months would no longer include Québec City, Cleveland, Ohio, and Anchorage, Alaska. Travelling to unexpected, exciting locations for international conferences every ‘summer’ (Australian winter!) has been one of the greatest pleasures of my last five years.

On the flip side, these cancellations have forced parts of our annual events to go digital for the first time. This is very positive. I am keenly aware of both the environmental consequences, and the underlying inequity, of holding annual professional events that require expensive, long-distance travel. Despite initiatives to fund travel for those who need it (especially by my favourite society, SMBE), sometimes getting to the US, or Europe, or wherever we are meeting that year, is simply out of reach for practical or financial reasons.

For all these reasons, it was exciting that the SMBE Walter Fitch Symposium went ahead online this year. Perhaps I’m slightly biased as a finalist, because it meant I was still able to deliver my talk. But I do think that this set a fantastic precedent for the practicality of holding parts of academic conferences online, both in the short-term COVID-19 world, and in the longer term. As we think more about the importance of environmental impact and global inclusion in science, a move towards at least partially digital conferences seems essential.

As always, the Fitch Symposium showcased postgraduate research from current or recent PhD graduates. This year, via YouTube. You can catch up on the talks here; Fitch Symposium YouTube playlist, or (excuse the self-promotion), you can watch my talk below!

The talented Alex Cagan also sketched this fabulous visual summary of my talk, which captures the main points in an instant!

Our new paper made the cover of the March issue of Evolution! This lovely little Notomys is part of Melbourne Museum’s Live Exhibits. Photo by David Paul.

Closely related species that occur across steep environmental gradients often show clear body size differences. Generally, species living in colder habitats or environments tend to be larger, while species in hotter habitats are smaller. This pattern is predicted by a biogeographic principle called ‘Bergmann’s Rule’.

We were interested in looking at this pattern in the Australian endemic Pseudomys Division, a recent radiation of small mammals that live across a diverse range of habitats in Australia – from the arid central desert to wet forest in mountains!

In our new paper we collated body size data and occurrence records for 31 species in the Pseudomys Division and used Bayesian phylogenetic models to test whether the biome and environmental conditions each species lives in can predict their body size.

Our results show that body size in these species predictably increases in the mesic biome and decreases in arid and monsoon biomes, in concordance with Bergmann’s rule. It is possible that we see this pattern due to the thermoregulatory benefits for species that live in cold environments – i.e., being larger helps to keep you warm in the cold, while being smaller helps to dissipate heat in the hot! There are also more resources available in colder, wetter forest habitats than in the arid desert; which also likely contributes to this pattern.

Check out the paper here: https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.13859

You can also see the nice ‘Digest’ write up by El-Deeb et al. on our article here: https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.13909