By Australian guest blogger Rachel Slatyer. Rachel is a PhD candidate studying adaptation in alpine grasshoppers. She spends her spare time sailing on tall ships and hopes to combine her science and sailing passions through involvement in the HMS Beagle Project.
When Charles Darwin put forward his theory of
evolution by natural selection, could he have imagined the enormous number of
questions that would arise from it? 150 years on, the huge volume of research on
evolution and how it works still seems to provide more questions than answers.
A little over a month ago, I was sailing into
Adelaide on HMB Endeavour,
seven weeks after leaving Fremantle. I left the ship to start a 3-year PhD, and
during my last days on board I was asked multiple times “So, why are you
starting a PhD?” As I sat at my desk, struggling to absorb an overwhelming
amount of new information about mountains, physiology, genetics and
grasshoppers, I asked myself the same question. Why was I back at university
when I could be sailing?
My research is looking into adaptations to life
in alpine environments, with a focus on grasshoppers. In Australia, true alpine
regions make up a tiny proportion of the country’s land area – 0.15% to be
precise. Mountains here aren’t very high either (our highest, Mount Kosciuszko, is
2200m), so there is not a lot of room for animals or plants to shift
up-mountain with increasing global warming.
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| Feral horses or "Brumbies", one of the region's more robust species / Rachel Slatyer |
Here we have a dilemma – species
must adapt to cope with warmer temperatures or face extinction. While there is
little doubt such adaptation is possible given enough time, whether evolution
can occur at a pace equal to global warming is less clear. Finding out exactly
what features allow animals to live in the alpine environment (not the easiest
of places) is the first step in answering this big question.
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| The Bogong High Plains, regenerating after 2003 wildfires / Rachel Slatyer |
Science can be a lonely road, especially at the
beginning of a new project. Everybody is busy on their own work, writing, doing
fieldwork, preparing talks. This was a hard change after the camaraderie of the
ship. However, I was soon to be reminded how tremendously stimulating and
exciting science research can be.
Last week I was lucky enough to join a group
from a different university on a trip to Thredbo, a mountain village in the Australian Alps. At
our lodge on the first evening, we pored over a huge book covering every
Australian grasshopper species, trying to make sense of cryptic species
descriptions (“frontal costa not, or very little sulcate”?!). We studied our
specimens under the microscope and had a lengthy discussion about whether a
particular part of the body was best described as a “thin transverse plate” or “wedge-shaped”.
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| Can she adapt? Chameleon grasshopper / Rachel Slatyer |
The next day, we watched tiny males locked in fierce combat, and pondered why
grasshoppers near the bottom of the mountain would jump when you disturb them,
while those at the top would bury themselves in the grass. This must surely be
an evolutionary adaptation, and I’m now curious about what would happen if you
took a grasshopper from the top of a mountain and put it near the bottom –
would it start jumping?
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| Like finding a needle in a haystack: a view of Central Ramshead from a field site / Rachel Slatyer |
Hiking for two hours up a mountain to look at something
on the top and spending an hour searching for an animal that isn’t there
doesn’t feel like work. Studying in an environment that is virtually unchanged
from what it would have been a hundred or two hundred years ago, and in which
there is still such a huge amount to learn provides a sense of freedom and
discovery that is remarkably akin to being out in the open ocean on a sailing
ship…
So next time somebody asks me why I’m doing a
PhD when I could be sailing, I’ll have an answer for them.
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