The harvest mouse, aptly named Micromys minutus, the minute mouse, is Britain's smallest rodent and also one of the most understudied. Before Ellie's started her Masters by Research supervised by Carl Soulsbury and I, the last comprehensive review of its status and distribution in Britain was chiefly the one by Stephen Harris in 1979 (although later works do exist).
Ellie set out to map out the distribution of the harvest mouse in Lincolnshire, a primarily agricultural county and one of the largest. In collaboration with the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust, Ellie spent a very long time dissecting owl pellets and Longworth trapping to provide a current snapshot and compare it to previous records. The good news is that harvest mice appear to have persisted in the county. To help inform conservation action, Ellie also analysed the co-occurrence of harvest mice and other small mammals and various environmental landscape features. Finally, she used population viability analysis to assess the minimum population size and habitat area required for population viability, as well as overall population resilience. Ellie's work has been featured by the newsletter of the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust, the bulletin of the Lincolnshire Naturalist Union and the 'Student of the month' highlight of the Mammal Society. Congratulations to Ellie!
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A couple of weeks back I talked about my new venture as a member of a Special Topics Network on Thermal Fertility Limits. This is a network of researchers interested in delving deeper into the mechanisms behind fertility failure following heat stress. I attended the first of three online meetings of the network and, after so many months at home with little interaction from a research perspective, it was so interesting and refreshing. We discussed a range of ideas around the topic and, as you'd expect, we had more questions than answers. We started off by asking: what do me mean with fertility? Do we intend viable eggs and sperm? Number of hatched young? Clutches of eggs? Then we moved on to thermal stress. Heat stress comes in lots of different forms, which one should we study? Long-term heat stress or short intense bursts? Should we be looking at a constant temperature, steady or sudden increase? If an animal/plant suffers damage, should be looking at irreversible damage or measure time to recovery? Are there sex differences (some initial evidence suggests there are)? Does it matter at what developmental stage heat stress happens? For insects, which undergo metamorphosis, early stages are usually immobile and less likely to be able to buffer damage caused by heat stress. Could this affect the lifespan of the individual post sexual maturity? There seem to be almost endless possibilities for student research! If you are interested please do get in touch to discuss this exciting and timely topic. I will be writing more as the network develops, meanwhile we will stay in touch and meet regularly. At the beginning of this year, I was invited to join a Special Topics Network of colleagues (mainly, but not exclusively, behavioural ecologists) of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology to work on the evolutionary ecology of thermal fertility limits. The network is chaired by Claudia Fricke, Tom Prize, Rhonda Snook and Amanda Bretman, and I was very excited to join this initiative.
I have previously noted that males and females show different sensitivity to temperature stress. This may tell us something about how species will be affected by climate change and how we might buffer or tackle these sensitivities. I am very keen to explore this further. As I mentioned previously, I have been isolating at home for over half a year now, and therefore I was disappointed that I would not be able to join the inaugural meeting of the Special Topics Network set to take place at the end of March 2020 in Germany. However, due to the current lockdown in place in most of Europe and the rest of the world, the inaugural meeting was hosted online. Three separate online sessions were hosted to allow all participants to have a say on how the network should be shaped, and what we would like to achieve, so more to follow soon! |
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August 2023
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