Global invertebrate diversity on coral reefs: the incredibly diverse and the not so diverse

Julian Caley is Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (www.aims.gov.au) where he studies population and community ecology, macroecology, and evolutionary biology using many different model organisms. His research explores ecological and contemporary evolutionary processes that generate and maintain biodiversity and how this knowledge can be used for effective conservation and resource management. Over the past few years he has been a leader of the Coral Reefs Project of the International Census of Marine Life. He will discuss new findings from this project about the global diversity of invertebrates on coral reefs.

Investigations into inordinate complexity of invertebrate food webs in tropical rainforests

Vojtech Novotny is interested in the ecology of plant-insect interactions in the tropics. He is leading the New Guinea Binatang Research Center in PNG (www.entu.cas.cz/png) and the Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology at the Czech Academy of Sciences in the Czech Republic (www.entu.cas.cz/png/cv-novotny-vojtech-lab.html). He studies community and evolutionary ecology of insect herbivores, especially in rainforest ecosystems. The science of food webs is at an exciting juncture as we are at last succeeding in documenting detailed descriptions of complicated rainforest food webs whilst also embarking on manipulative experiments, testing their functional responses. These developments are helped by rapid progress in molecular methods, aiding the detection of species and trophic interactions in the field as well as the interpretation of observed patterns in phylogenetic context. Vojtech will discuss recent developments in food web science using examples from Papua New Guinea, where the third largest tropical rainforest on the planet, and the only one owned by its original inhabitants, offers exciting opportunities whilst also posing certain challenges to the enterprising ecologist.

Resilience to a changing climate: what processes support wetland invertebrate community persistence?

Jenny Davis holds the chair of Freshwater Ecology in the Australian Centre for Biodiversity at Monash University. Her research interests include invertebrate community ecology, bioassessment and biomonitoring, ecosystem resilience, feedback mechanisms, regime change and the impacts of multiple stressors on shallow aquatic ecosystems. Jenny has worked on the structure and function of wetland invertebrate communities in arid, temperate and Mediterranean regions. Her sustained involvement in wetland research in Western Australia and central Australia has created longterm datasets that document the temporal and spatial changes occurring under changing climatic regimes. Jenny will present recent research on the critical hydrological, ecological and landscape processes that support the persistence of invertebrate communities in inland aquatic ecosystems.

Comparing the susceptibility of temperate and tropical insects to climate change: which are more susceptible?

Ary Hoffmann is an ARC Australian Laureate Fellow at the Departments of Zoology and Genetics at Melbourne University. He has been researching the impacts of thermal and desiccation stresses on insects and particularly drosophilids for many years, particularly from an evolutionary perspective. His contributions include the first evidence using genetic markers that insect populations were adapting to recent climate change, the first comparative assessment of evolutionary potential across climate specialist and generalist insect species, and the identification of genes and genetic processes involved in climate adaptation.

Do taxonomic decisions equate to scientific hypotheses?

Lyn Cook’s research at The University of Queensland is primarily aimed at understanding the origins, diversification and distributions of organisms, especially plants and insects in Australia.  She mostly uses molecular phylogenetics, and analyses of the traits and spatial distributions of organisms, to try to understand patterns and processes of speciation.  Her recent contributions have covered topics including whether host-specialisation is an evolutionary dead-end, how past climate change has shaped the current distributions of taxa, the assembly of the flora and fauna of current biomes, and analytical techniques relating to hypothesis-testing approaches in biogeography.  In the wake of recent controversy following her co-authored paper on whether morphology need be included in new species descriptions, Lyn will discuss issues relevant to modern taxonomic practice and looks forward to some vigorous philosophical debate.