Recent work has unearthed strong relationships between aging and average sociability. Clear patterns of decreases in average sociability have been observed across taxa, many of these often sex-specific. Individuals, however, generally deviate from the population averages, and discounting individual variance in their social behaviour could disguise mechanisms of adaptation, selection, and developmental stability. Here, we leverage nearly four decades of behavioural data on a population of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins to bring a new lens to our understanding of social aging by exploring individual differences in sociability (repeatability, i.e. personality), its variance (predictability), and how aging impacts sociability (plasticity) and its underlying variance (malleability). Using novel analytical methods, we demonstrate the existence of a multilevel response, where individuals’ sociability (group size) changed significantly throughout life, both in average response and its underlying variance. Sociability increased for the first two decades of life, then declined with age, a trend more pronounced with males. More importantly, the predictability of individual sociability increases throughout life, indicating that individual group size preferences strengthen (despite oscillations) with age. These patterns suggest that individuals develop social competence, defined as accruing social information via experience presumably to optimise their social relationships for a net fitness benefit. Together, these findings provide novel insights into sex-specific social aging and illustrate how studying variance can reveal processes of competence, selection, and adaptation.

As the climate changes, where plants currently occur may no longer be suitable to their persistence. One hypothesized way for plant populations to persist is by range shifting through dispersal by frugivorous migratory birds. However, the true potential for this remains unclear. Recent advancements in continent-wide and year-long data curation have opened up the potential to assess migratory-bird assisted movement of plants. Here, we assess the spatially - explicit potential for migratory birds to disperse seeds into new climatic ranges across the European continent. We use ten years of bird records from the European Bird Portal, a database that collects over 40 million bird records per year across 29 European countries, and accompany this with plant records from the European Vegetation Archive, a database of over 2 million vegetation plots across Europe. We assess this for 563 unique bird species –plant species pairwise relationships, made up of the 46 European bird species known to be legitimate seed dispersers of 81 plant species, rather than seed predators. We use a combination of weekly Spatio-Temporal Exploratory Modelling, Species Distribution Modelling, and detailed trait and phenology information, to calculate speed, gut retention time, and directionality, and to assess range filling potential. We predict range filling under climate projections for two scenarios: “Sustainability” (SSP1.2.6) and “Regional Rivalry” (SSP3.7.0). We show which plant species are most likely to benefit from migratory bird assisted dispersal in Europe, which birds contribute most, and unpack the contributing factors. Finally, we demonstrate the spatially-explicit potential for plant range filling in Europe under different climatic scenarios and highlight key areas that may support bird-assisted plant migration in Europe under future climates.

Dingoes were likely introduced to the Australian continent by seafarers during the Late Holocene. However, the precise timing of their arrival and other aspects of their historical biogeography remain uncertain. Outstanding questions include: How many founding events took place? How rapidly did dingoes establish themselves across the continent? And did humans facilitate their dispersal? In this talk, I will present the outline and initial results of my PhD project, which is reconstructing the colonisation, establishment and ecological impacts of dingoes in Australia from their arrival until European colonisation. By combining spatially explicit population genomic analyses with process-based ecological models, my project aims to gain a more detailed understanding of dingoes’ origin, history and impact. It is expected that the results will deepen our understanding of Australia’s natural history and provide valuable insights for the conservation and management of dingoes.

Bee hotels are widely promoted as conservation tools, yet evidence of their effectiveness for solitary bees is limited. We investigated how nesting space density in bee hotels influences occupancy by solitary bees and potential competing arthropods. We placed 360 bee hotels (carboard straws in wood blocks), half were clumped in groups of 12 (aggregated), and half placed singly 1 meter from other nests (dispersed), on 15 sugarcane headlands abutting rainforest. From February to July 2024, occupancy by all arthropods was marginally higher in dispersed than aggregated hotels (β = 0.50, p = 0.052; 91% vs. 86%). This was driven by increased occupancy of wasps (OR = 2.93, p < 0.0001) and spiders (OR = 4.15, p < 0.0001) in dispersed hotels and ants in aggregated nests (~55% vs. 32% occupancy; OR = 2.56, p < 0.001). Bee occupancy was low overall (3.6%–5.9%) and not significantly affected by design (p = 0.18). In August, when bee activity was at its peak, excluding ants from half of each hotel type increased bee occupancy (β = -1.2287, p = 0.016) in both aggregated hotels (27% when ants excluded, vs 9.9% without exclusions) and dispersed hotels (20.1% when ants excluded vs 6.9%). With ant exclusions applied to all hotels from September to December, occupancy was higher in dispersed hotels (β = 0.86, p < 0.001; 78% vs. 71%), driven by higher wasp (OR = 1.63, p = 0.022) and spider (OR = 2.07, p = 0.023) use. Bee occupancy remained low and unaffected by design (p = 0.77). These results suggest bees face strong competition for nesting space in bee hotels regardless of nesting density, and that aggregated hotels may facilitate ant colonisation, suppressing bee use. Our findings highlight that competition by other arthropods is an important factor to consider when designing bee hotels.

Wildlife conservation and pest management in remote semi-arid rangeland habitats are often constrained by a deficiency of species distribution data. Traditional ground-based survey methods and citizen science efforts are often cost-prohibitive and logistically challenging at broad scales in remote regions, hindering efforts to monitor and collect detailed data for native and invasive species. This project explores the utility of remote sensing and field-based validation to detect and assess the distribution of two semi-fossorial mammals, the native southern hairy-nosed wombat (Lasiorhinus latifrons) and the invasive European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) across the Nullarbor Plain.

Using open-source satellite imagery, over 34,000 wombat and 17,000 rabbit warrens have been digitised across approximately 210,000 km² of the Nullarbor bioregion, offering fixed proxies of species presence. This presentation will focus on the validation of remotely detected warrens through targeted field surveys, assessing the detection accuracy across varying image conditions and habitat types. Preliminary analyses also explore the spatial patterns of warren co-occurrence and environmental variables that influence habitat use.

This work lays the foundation for subsequent ecological modelling and range shift projections under environmental change. By refining methods for integrating satellite data into species monitoring, the project aims to improve the accessibility and scalability of conservation and pest management tools for semi-arid ecosystems. Preliminary results highlight both the potential and limitations of remote imagery for broad-scale detection of semi-fossorial mammals in remote and data-poor regions.