I'm very excited that I was chosen to be one of the ~20 new associate editors for J Animal Ecology. Having done my PhD in Australia, then moving straight to Germany for a postdoc (during which the pandemic hit too), I wasn't able to engage with the vibrant British ecology scene (particularly the BES) as much I wanted to. Now that I am based back in the UK, I'm trying to make up for that. Joining the AE team for a BES journal has been a goal of mine for a while given the top quality science consistently published and promoted across their journals. My top three cited papers are in JAE so the journal does hold a special place in my academic heart and can't wait to contribute to their success from the other side. If you want to check out all the amazing new editors, check out this link: https://animalecologyinfocus.com/2023/05/26/our-new-associate-editors-2023/
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This has been in the works for a while now, but since I have physically moved to Manchester I think it's a good time to announce I'll be starting a research fellowship at Salford Uni in a couple of weeks! I've been enjoying a bit of down time the last few months which has been great, but I am very excited to start a new chapter as an independent researcher. Looking forward to beginning some new exciting collaborations with scientists at Salford, and kickstarting a disease ecology project on gulls that has been in the pipeline a while. Ive even got my first conference booked - BOU in Nottingham this April. Looking forward to catching up on all the amazing ornithological research going on in the UK!
It's been a busy 6 months - my job contract is up in August and I'm trying to push as many projects out the door as possible. Whilst I was a bit hesitant to use preprints at first, a recent experience where a paper was in review for over a year in total (don't ask what the end result was) , made me realize that life - and academic contracts - are too short to wait for the peer review process. So I've fully embraced letting everyone see my typos and have four preprints published over the last few weeks.
We just had our paper on temporal dynamics of meerkat gut microbiomes out in Nat Comms and I'm just super stoked about this one! Three years work, including finding the samples (they were spread across the world), getting them Germany, and then figuring out how to incorporate an internal standard so that we could estimate ratios of bacterial load. This bit took a lot of trial runs to get the concentrations right and was massively facilitated by our very competent lab manager, Kerstin Wilhelm. Read the paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26298-5.
I've been working with PhD student Priscilla Alpizar on some bat gut microbiome data she collected in Costa Rica, and the paper has just been published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution in their special issue on the impact of anthropogenic change on animal microbiomes (link to paper here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.746783/full).
This was a fun paper to work on and it yielded interesting results. Whilst intensive agriculture is generally known to have negative effects on biodiversity, in this context the crop was banana, whose flowers provide a nectar food source for nectar-feeding bat species. Therefore, some nectar-feeding bats, including the Pallas's long-tongued bat studied by Pri, often forage in these intensive plantations. Is this a good thing? A bad thing? Are these plantations acting as ecological traps? It is conceivable that insecticides used in these monocultures have direct (chemical pollution) and indirect (reduce diet diversity and nutrition) effects on bat health, even though they are providing a nectar food source. It should be noted that whilst this species is largely nectar feeding, they are actually omnivorous and also feed on invertebrates. I wrote an opinion piece called 'Applying the core microbiome to understand host-microbe systems', which I was luckily enough to publish in one of my fave journals, Journal of Animal Ecology. This idea stemmed from a discussion with reviewers of a paper I had submitted, where each of the reviewers and editors had a very specific (and often different) idea of what the core microbiome meant. The core microbiome has traditionally pertained to what are likely to be functional microbes within a microbial community, but given with a bit of imagination we can link almost any trait to 'function' (commonness, stability, keystoneness, etc), as well as the fact that 'function' has numerous definitions (although these can be split into two major conceptual groups, as nicely summarized by Klaassen 2018), this has lead to the concept of the core microbiome being extremely widely applied (at least in ecological fields), yet not very well defined. This lack of definition makes it relatively unpopular with pure microbiologists, I believe, who apply it far less frequently than ecologists, and generally think of the core in terms of functional genes rather than key taxonomic units. I had a look through the host-microbe special issues of Molecular Ecology and Journal of Animal Ecology from 2018 before I wrote the piece, and found 14 articles, out of all published across the two special issues, applied or referred to the core microbiome. I reckon that was about a third of all papers.
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