Plant respiration: Controlled by photosynthesis or biomass?
By: Collalti, A., Tjoelker, M.G., Hoch, G., Mäkelä, A., Guidolotti, G., Heskel, M., Petit, G., Ryan, M.G., Battipaglia, G., Matteucci, G. and Prentice, I.C., 2019. Global Change Biology. | Find with Google Scholar »
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Dear all,
S2 teaching has finished, with only assessments and grading to go – it’s quiet around the corridors while small teams tackle marking! But that means that awards ceremonies and end-of-year celebrations approach – please check out the calendar of upcoming events.
With catastrophic fire danger announced for this week, please stay safe and for those who live near the bush have your fire plans ready.
cheers
Michelle
Save the Date
This week 11th – 15th November
Wed 13th: MQ2020 Curriculum Changes: Implementation Staff Forum; 10 – 11am; 102 Theatrette, 09 Wally’s Walk (09WW).
Wed 13th: Department Morning Tea; 10.30 – 11am; 14EAR-280 (Biology Tea Room).
Wed 13th: Special Department Seminar – Professor Petteri Vihervaara, Finnish Environment Institute (SKYE) Finland; 12.00pm – 1.00pm; 14EAR-280 (Biology Tea Room).
Thu 14th: AARGH: R-Users Group (RUG) Help Session; 3.30 – 5.30pm; Continuum Room (75 Talavera Road, room 3114).
Thu 14th: Biology Social Club; 5.00 – 7.00pm; Biology Courtyard.
Following week 18th – 22nd November
Mon 18th – Fri 22nd: Writing Boot Camp – to give HDR students a block of time to work on writing; all week; on campus (TBC).
Mon 18th: MQ Excellence Awards (Academic staff); register here
Wed 20th: MQ Excellence Awards (Professional staff); register here
Wed 20th: Book Launch Morning Tea for Frankham et al’s Latest Work; 10.30 – 11am; 14EAR-280 (Biology Tea Room).
Weekly Events
Wed: Shut up and Write Sessions; 11.00am – 12.00pm; 6WW(E8C)-212 or 14EAR(E8A)-360A.
Thu: Venture Café; 3–8pm; (map). Find out what is on each week here – https://venturecafesydney.org/
Fri: Writing Workshops with Prof Ken Cheng – to support HDRs and ECRs with scientific writing; 2 – 4pm; Ken’s office at 205b Culloden Road, G12.
Fri: Behaviour and Evolution Journal Club; Friday at 12:30pm (bring your lunch); 205B Culloden Rd Boardroom.
Weekly Biological Sciences seminar program is here
Future Events
Nov 26th: DVCR Weather Report 2019; 3 – 4pm; Macquarie Theatre, 21 Wally’s Walk. Register here.
Dec 3rd: Department Formal Exam Meeting followed by End-of-Year Party 
.
Dec 5th: Department Research Retreat for Academic Staff.
General News and Announcements
Congratulations
Big congratulations to PhD candidate Nicolette Armansin. Whilst running a popular and successful workshop last year on network analysis (supported by the Department of Biological Sciences), she also coordinated a paper writing session from which she is now first author on a paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution! Always a pleasure to highlight successes of our HDR students!
Link to the paper:
https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-5347(19)30280-0
DVCR Weather Report 2019 – Professor Sakkie Pretorius, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) invites you to this presentation. He will provide an update on Macquarie University’s research excellence, engagement and impact in 2019. In particular, he will be sharing some insights and strategies based on Macquarie’s results from the 2018 Excellence in Research Australia and Engagement and Impact exercises.
Looking to the future, he will talk about initiatives in our research pipeline that will shape the future of research at Macquarie University.
WHEN – Tuesday, 26 November, 2019, 3.00 pm – 4.00 pm.
WHERE -Macquarie Theatre – 21 Wally’s Walk.
RSVP – Friday, 22 November, 2019.
MQ2020 Curriculum Changes: Implementation Staff Forum – an Open Forum was recently held for FSE students. A forum for any Faculty of Science and Engineering staff who would like more information regarding implementation timelines for MQ2020 is planned. There is a lot of information to navigate through and many of you are at the coal-face of answering student questions. Therefore, Faculty admin want to provide you with an opportunity to hear from Faculty and University colleagues regarding implementation next steps and responses to FAQs that we have been gathering via Student Connect and our Faculty Student Centre.
Details: Wednesday 13 November, 10am-11am, 102 Theatrette, 09 Wally’s Walk (09WW).
If you are unable to attend the session, more information regarding MQ2020 implementation can be found here.
Please direct any questions regarding the forum to <fse-enquiries@mq.edu.au>.
Plant of the Week -click the thumbnails for larger images-
Pandorea jasminoides – Bower Vine
This vigorous climbing plant from eastern Australia could easily be mistaken for an exotic plant. Green Walls are all the go right now, and rather surprisingly, Pandorea jasminoides, the Bower Vine, has become internationally popular for Green Wall planting.
Lunchtime Litter Collection – The days may be cooler, but they’re also clear and sunny. Lunchtime is a great time to go for a walk and get some vitamin D! It’s also a great time to join the Biology Litter Collection competition! The next event will be Tuesday 12th November, 1pm. Meet in the Biology courtyard, bring a bucket or bag if you can.
We’ll be holding events throughout the rest of the year, every few weeks. At each event you go out to collect litter, between 1 and 1:30pm. Collections will be assessed at the end of each collection and gold stars awarded accordingly. Event results are tallied at the end of the year with a prize for the best collector.
Event dates: Tues 12th November; Tues 10th December.
OPPORTUNITIES
Research on Plant-Pollinator Relationships – opportunities for involvement as student, volunteer or collaborator, with field trips scheduled to Port Macquarie during Nov/Dec 2019 and Jan 2020. If interested, please contact Professor Graham Pyke at <Graham.Pyke@mq.edu.au>.
For more details, please consult this word document
eFLOWER Summer School Down Under – Royal Botanic Garden Sydney and UNSW, Australia; 1-10 April 2020.
Applications are now open for the eFLOWER Summer School Down Under to be held at the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney and the University of New South Wales (Australia) from 1 to 10 April 2020. The goal of the eFLOWER Summer School Down Under will be to deliver high-quality training in the modern comparative methods used to study plant macroevolution, while at the same time offering the students the opportunity to contribute to future targets of the eFLOWER project. While the methods are general and applicable to any group of organisms, all of our empirical datasets will be drawn from our recent work on flowering plants. A unique feature of this School will be that the students themselves will participate in the creation of the datasets (floral traits and fossil calibrations) in the RBG’s collaborative database PROTEUS, thereby gaining hands-on experience of the problems and questions associated with compiling data and building real-life datasets for comparative analyses. In doing so, it is hoped to further promote the rapidly evolving field of macroevolution among graduate students in plant sciences, while also conveying our experience in building high-quality datasets.
For all details about this event, please see the RBG’s webpage: https://www.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au/eflowerdownunder.
SEMINARS AND WORKSHOPS
Special Biological Sciences Seminar – Date/Time: Wednesday, 13th November, 2019; 12.00pm – 1.00pm. Speaker: Profesor Petteri Vihervaara, Finnish Environment Institute (SKYE) Finland. Title: The talk title is in two parts: Outlook on European Biodiversity and Ecosystem Assessments (Part 1) & Multisource and Multiscale Earth Observation of Biodiversity in Boreal Forests (Part 2). Venue: 14EAR-280 (Biology Tea Room). More information on this and all department seminars ON OUR WEBPAGE HERE.
AARGH: R-Users Group (RUG) Help Session – Do you have a problem with data analysis? You might want to give R a go which is a fantastic analytical and plotting tool. For all your R-related queries, drop by the ‘Ask An R Geek for Help’ (aaRgh) session where you can get one-on-one assistance. Or just come by, have some tea, and work on your code. For more details, visit https://github.com/mqRusers.
Date: November 14th, 2019. Time: 3:30 PM to 5:30 PM. Venue: Continuum Room (75 Talavera Road, room 3114). There will be snacks and beverages (BYO mug).
If you’re unable to attend a help session and would like some help from the MQ R user group community – try posting your problem on our Talkyard page! This follows a stack-exchange format and anyone can post questions and answers – all questions across all platforms are permitted as long as they’re about data/stats.
Sign up and follow the discussion here: https://mq-data-advice.talkyard.net
Calling all ecologists, geographers or remote-sensing researchers to attend the x-sensing conference in November!
When: Workshop, 22th Nov – 26th Nov; Conference 27th – 29th Nov
Where: National Marine Science Centre, Coffs Harbour
What: The ‘cross-sensing’ conference aims to unite scientists from diverse fields with industry professionals and experts in artificial intelligence. The week-long meeting is divided into two parts: a 2-day training workshop and a 3-day cross-disciplinary conference centred on a hack day.
Although the meeting has a technical focus, many of the tutorials and the hack-day are designed to appeal to non-coders too. We have some specialists from NVIDIA coming to teach us about their point-and-click machine learning software, which they say can be used by anyone. There will be plenty of technical expertise at the conference and hack-day, but we also need researchers who bring challenges and domain knowledge to define projects.
For more information, please visit http://x-sensing.net or get in touch with Dr Cormac Purcell <cormac.purcell@mq.edu.au>.
Molecular Sciences Seminar – Date/Time: Tuesday, 12th November, 2019; 1pm – 2pm. Speaker: Christopher Rodrigues from University of Technology Sydney (UTS).Title: New Biology Underlying the Development of Bacterial Spores. Venue: 4WW 322 Seminar room.
Shut Up and Write Sessions – every Wednesday 11am. It’s pretty simple, we shut up… and we write. Using the pomodoro technique we’ll meet at 11am to write, stop 25 minutes in for a 10 min break, then settle down again for another 25 minutes of writing. You’ll be amazed how productive you can be. More details on the concept here: https://thesiswhisperer.com/shut-up-and-write/
Room will be either 6WW(E8C)-212 or 14EAR(E8A)-360A, email <lizzy.lowe@mq.edu.au> to confirm or with any questions.
All welcome!
Venture Café – Want to know more about innovation, and how to achieve it? Come along to the Venture Cafe, Thursday, 3pm – 8pm, (map). Find out what is on each week here – https://venturecafesydney.org/
This week: 3.00pm: Grassroots Medtech; 3.00pm: Demo Tables: 14 November Thursday Gathering; 5.00pm: Lightning Round Pitches!; 5.30pm: Interactive: MedTech Hypotheticals; 6.45pm: Workshop: Active MedTech Product Development.
Wildlife at the Watering Hole – 3rd Tuesday of each month, 6:30pm @ Botany View Hotel, King St Newtown!
Events from AINSE (The Australian Institue of Nuclear Science and Engineering)
ANSTO Industry Foundations Scholarship – Applications now open (deadline 22 November 2019). More information ANSTO’s website.
International Youth Nuclear Congress (IYNC) 2020 (8-13 March 2020) – Call for Abstracts now open (deadline 15 November 2019). More information IYNC2020 website.
32nd Australian Colloid and Surface Science Student Conference (28-31 January 2020) – Call for Abstracts now open (deadline 15 November 2019). More information on the conference website.
Australian X-ray Analytical Association (AXAA) 2020 Conference & Exhibition (29 April – 1 May 2020) – Call for Abstracts now open (deadline 29 November 2019). For more information, please visit the conference website.
HDR NEWS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Writing Boot Camp – Date/Time: Monday 18th- Friday 22nd November; all week. Venue: on campus (TBC). Suitable for: HDR students who have already completed analysis for a manuscript/chapter, and have discussed with the supervisor the intended direction of the work, and have a target journal in mind.
This boot camp is designed to give you a block of time to work on writing. Help (including from your peers) will be available on writing structure, but this is NOT an introduction to writing, NOR will there be help with analysis. The idea is that you arrive with an idea for the manuscript and the analyses done, and that you will write the whole first draft in the week of the Boot Camp.
Space be available for ~12 students, so if you are interested and committed, please contact Simon: <simon.griffith@mq.edu.au>. Some meals will be provided.
Research Enrichment Program (REP) Workshop Series – The Department now has a fully fledged research enrichment program for 2019 – you can find out about upcoming workshops here (click on this PDF). All HDR students are encouraged to attend several of these workshops each year to develop their skills and track record for the post-PhD world. Supervisors please encourage your students!
PhD Students: got a grant? Dept. will co-fund up to $1500 – The Department would like to encourage students to seek external sources of funding, and has a small budget with which to support successful candidates.New limits from 2019:PhD students ONLY: Dept. will match up to $1500 of external (non-MQ) funding ONCE during the student’s candidature.
If you have received a grant (student as chief investigator) and wish to request co-funding, please forward a copy of the award letter to <sharyon.odonnell@mq.edu.au> and <wenjing.wang@mq.edu.au>.
Are You a HDR Student? Need Help with Writing? HDR Mentors in collaboration with HDR Learning Skills is running another round of Peer Writing Assistance (PWA) for the rest of the year! This program is designed to support MRES and HDR candidates in managing thesis writing and research-related concerns. All peer writing assistants have undergone training for their role and are current PhD candidates at Macquarie.
The PWA program is based on the principle of collaborative learning in which a more experienced research student helps you develop stronger academic and research skills. Peer Writing Assistants are not teachers. Rather, they are trained to function as a ‘friendly audience’ or ‘fresh pair of eyes’ to help you gain new perspectives on your writing or research ideas.
Registrations are now open for individual consultation bookings. If you are interested, please go to book in for a 45-minute session with a PWA here.
And:
Writing Workshops – Convened by Ken Cheng, running weekly for most of the year: Fridays 2-4pm in Ken’s office at 205b Culloden Road, G12.
These writing workshops are meant for HDR students and early-career researchers. In these face-to-face encounters, writing at any stage of any genre is welcome, from first draft to final polish, from empirical paper to literature review to popular news story. Ken envisages personal feedback linked perhaps with rounds of revisions on selected passages during the session. The aim is not just to get stuff written, but to write everything well.
Those interested in attending a session should email Ken Cheng <ken.cheng@mq.edu.au> by Wednesday 12:00-noon, preferably with a draft attached of what they are working on and some indication of what they especially need help with.
ADMIN THINGS
Department Meeting (Nov) 2019 – PowerPoint slides.
The Department’s Annual Report 2018 is now published and available here. It is packed full of news and events and showcases our people and achievements for the year. A cracker of a read! It will be available on the website very soon, so please pass on to your networks, colleagues and friends.
Need to Contact the Biology Admin Team via Email? Please send your email to <fse.bio-adm@mq.edu.au> or drop in and see us. The old google group (sci.bio-adm) email no longer works, if you have this email as a remembered address please delete.
Outreach Activities – Have You Participated in an Activity for Biology Recently? Don’t forget to fill in the super-quick form here – ACCESS OUTREACH FORM HERE
Building Name Changes – Cheat Sheet – If you are trying to identify buildings on campus with new names or old names, please use this link to convert them from old to new or vice versa.
THIS AND THAT
Accommodation Needed – A new cotutelle PhD student, Cecillia Hjort is arriving form Sweden in January to join Rachael Dudaniec’s lab for a project on bumblebees. She is looking to rent a semi-or fully furnished apartment OR a shared house/apartment, close to a train station or MQ. Minimum stay 6 months. Please contact <cecilia.hjort@biol.lu.se> if you are looking to rent your place from January 2020.
Free to a Good Home from the Downing Herbarium – If anyone is in need of a small trolley (see photos) and/or oil heater (photo), please feel free to collect from the Downing Herbarium. Items are no longer needed in the herbarium. Contact Karen Marais karen.marais@mq.edu.au or call x8231 for more info.
Weekly Fruit and Harvest Hub – The fruit you’ve been eating in department gatherings has been coming from Harvest Hub for the last few years. Harvest Hub has now closed and moved to a new arrangement called Box Divvy. The new arrangement doesn’t suit us so we will trial a few different fruit providers over the next couple of months. If you have any feedback on what you like and what you don’t, please email your comments to <samantha.newton@mq.edu.au>.
Box Divvy – You might be interested in signing up to Box Divvy for your home fruit and veg orders. https://www.boxdivvy.com/
What is Box Divvy? Harvest Hub has worked closely with NSW Health, Western Sydney Diabetes Alliance and various councils to re-develop Harvest Hub into an ordering platform that provides fresh, local produce that is easy to access anywhere, affordable to anyone regardless of income, and is easy to use.
The Benefits
- Reduce your food bill by 40% compared with regular retail
- Same quality produce and range as Harvest Hub, but even fresher as direct
- Growers are getting paid a fair price for their produce: 65c in every dollar you spend goes back to the farmers and food producers, and they get paid on order. (Supermarkets pay around 35c in the dollar, and usually pay after 30-60 days).
- A growing range of grocery products, and next year: dairy, sustainable seafood and meat
- Minimal packaging
- A 90% reduction in carbon emissions compared with supermarkets
How Does It Work? Box Divvy is a box-sharing App – everything that is supplied to the Hub is in wholesale-size quantities to the Hub to share but it’s shared through the App between those members wanting that particular item: a 10kg box of tomatoes or cucumbers; Groceries are about to change in the way they are sold so it will be a total minimum spend for the whole Hub – you can pick and choose with these.
Correct Method for Submitting to Department Matters
Department Matters submissions now have their own email address. Please send all your news items for the newsletter to <fse.bionewsletter@mq.edu.au>
Also, please see the following to correctly format your additions, and keep them rolling in!
You may have noticed that we try to keep all the articles to the same format for the Department Matters, however, rest assured, they do NOT all turn up in this format! To help keep your Department Matters looking as good as possible, when sending in additions to the Newsletter, please try to keep these formatting guidelines in mind.
- Please write in third person. The information is coming from the Newsletter, not directly from you.
- Do not use fancy text formatting. Bold heading, normal text, and only italics or bold to highlight. No font size changes will make it through, sorry.
- If sending via email, set your email output to basic. HTML output will add all sort of formatting that will have to be removed before your article can go into the newsletter.
- Keep your submission short and direct (two paragraphs) and if possible provide a document, email or link where readers can get more information. Any long submissions will be cropped.
Keeping to these guidelines will streamline your article’s addition to the newsletter. Thank you.
Have You Missed Out on an Issue of Department Matters? Back issues can be found at this newsletter archive link for your reading pleasure.
New Publications
Dietary methoprene enhances sexual competitiveness of sterile male Queensland fruit flies in field cages
By: Adnan, Saleh Mohammad, Iffat Farhana, Jess Inskeep, Polychronis Rempoulakis, and Phillip W. Taylor. Journal of Pest Science (2019): 1-13. | Find with Google Scholar »Re-evaluating the population size of South American fur seals and conservation implications
By: Baylis, Alastair MM, Rachael A. Orben, Alexander A. Arkhipkin, John Barton, Robert L. Brownell Jr, Iain J. Staniland, and Paul Brickle. Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems (2019). | Find with Google Scholar »Mixed evidence for shifts to faster carbon capture strategies towards range edges of two coastal invasive plants in eastern Australia
By: Tabassum, Samiya, and Michelle R. Leishman. Biological Invasions: 1-13. | Find with Google Scholar »The capping pheromones and putative biosynthetic pathways in worker and drone larvae of honey bees Apis mellifera
By: Qin, Qiu-Hong, Xu-Jiang He, Andrew B. Barron, Lei Guo, Wu-Jun Jiang, and Zhi-Jiang Zeng. Apidologie: 1-11. | Find with Google Scholar »Identifying technology solutions to bring conservation into the innovation era
By: Iacona, G., Ramachandra, A., McGowan, J., Davies, A., Joppa, L., Koh, L.P., Fegraus, E., Game, E., Guillera‐Arroita, G., Harcourt, R. and Indraswari, K., Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. | Find with Google Scholar »Is NPP proportional to GPP? Waring’s hypothesis 20 years on
By: Collalti, A., and I. C. Prentice. Tree Physiology (2019). | Find with Google Scholar »Occurrence and extent of hybridisation between the invasive Mallard Duck and native Yellow-billed Duck in South Africa
By: Stephens, K., Measey, J., Reynolds C., Le Roux, J.J. Biological Invasions, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-019-02122-6 | Find with Google Scholar »Yards increase forest connectivity in urban landscapes
By: Ossola, Alessandro, Dexter Locke, Brenda Lin, and Emily Minor. Landscape Ecology: 1-14. | Find with Google Scholar »In the Media
Maciej Maselko was featured on 2SER Weekend Breakfast
Dr Maciej Maselko from the Department of Biological Sciences was featured on 2SER Weekend Breakfast regarding a project to create genetically modified mosquitoes to help eradicate deadly viruses such as zika and dengue. This story was originally published on The Lighthouse.
Simon Griffith was featured on ABC Online
Professor Simon Griffith from the Department of Biological Sciences was featured on ABC Online providing comment on Halloween decorations being used as tools in bird nests.
Rick Shine was featured on ABC Online
Professor Rick Shine from the Department of Biological Sciences was featured on ABC Online providing comment on how to keep snakes out of your home.
Stephan Leu was featured in Forbes magazine
Dr Stephan Leu from the Department of Biological Sciences was featured in Forbes magazine regarding new research findings about the behaviour of Great White Sharks.
Jane Williamson was featured on NBN News and 2SER
Associate Professor Jane Williamson from the Department of Biological Sciences was featured on NBN News and 2SER regarding using remote control vehicles to research deep-sea life.
Culum Brown contributed to The Conversation
Professor Culum Brown from the Department of Biological Sciences contributed the article ‘Curious Kids: how do fish sleep?’ to The Conversation.