Sleep Ecophysiology Group

The last couple of days we were fortunate enough to host Associate Professor Bruno van Swinderen from the Queensland Brain Institute, and Dr Vanessa Kellerman from Monash University to discuss future studies on sleeping flatworms and fruit flies. What an amazing opportunity for us!

[Left-to-right: John Lesku, Vanessa Kellerman, Bruno van Swinderen, Robin Johnsson, Erika Zaid, Anne Aulsebrook, Shauni Omond]

A BIG Congratulations to soon-to-be-Dr Alynn Martin from the University of Tasmania on her latest article! Here, Alynn provides a comprehensive investigation into the effects of mange on wombats in Narawntapu National Park.

Infrared thermographic analyses to measure heat loss from living animals, doubly labelled water to quantify field metabolic rates, accelerometry data logging to show changes in prominent behaviours, and fatty acid composition in various tissues. Wow!

How do wombats respond to increasing severity of mange? Read it to find out!

It is my pleasure to welcome Shauni Omond (left) and Robin Johnsson (right) to the lab.  Our newest PhD students!

Here, Linh and I give an invited review on the recent characterization of sleep in jellyfish by Nath et al. (2017) Current Biology.  Speaking of Linh…

Congratulations on graduating and for the next big steps in your life.  I still wish you were staying around for a PhD, but am excited to hear of your adventures to come.  You’re amazing!

Part of a Special Issue on “Wild Clocks”, we outline the methodologies involved for measuring “Wild Sleep“:

Niels Rattenborg, Horacio de la Iglesia, Bart Kempenaers, John Lesku, Peter Meerlo and Madeleine Scriba, “Sleep research goes wild: new methods and approaches to investigate the ecology, evolution and functions of sleep”.

This makes for an excellent companion piece to our 2016 article in Trends in Ecology & Evolution on the need to ‘go wild’.

Congratulations to Shauni Omond, Linh Ly and colleagues for the newly-published paper in the journal SLEEP demonstrating sleep in platyhelminth flatworms!

 

Linh Ly just successfully defended her Honours thesis on the “Activity patterns of jellyfish“.  Well done, Linh, on the well deserved first-class Honours!

…now with Honours!

Many thanks to La Trobe University for the promotion to Senior Lecturer.  Thanks also to the Department of Ecology, Environment and Evolution and School of Life Sciences for unending support!