PSA Awards

photo credit: Nicholas Pattinson

I am really grateful for the financial support provided to my overseas data collection. This is my second PhD year, and I have spent six months (September 2019 - March 2020) in the South African Kalahari desert investigating how heat stress may impact cognition in wild animals. Cognition is an animal’s ability to process and respond to information from the surrounding environment. Animals’ survival, reproductive success, and adjustment to environmental changes can depend on their cognitive performance. As temperatures are rapidly increasing, understanding the effect of heat stress on cognition has become crucial.

In the Kalahari, I study a wild population of Southern pied babblers (Turdoides bicolor) that has been habituated to close human observation. Every day in the field I localize a group of babblers, approach them to weigh all the individuals (they jump on a scale to access a small food reward), perform behavioural observations and cognitive testing. To assess how hot temperatures affect cognitive performance, I test the same individual under a non-heat stress and a heat stress condition (identified from the display of heat dissipation behaviours, such as panting - you can see two individuals panting at the bottom left in the photo!). During this field season, I performed 226 cognitive tests, monitored 41 nests, and ringed 47 new individuals for identification in the study population. This is more than twice the data that I collected during my first field season, and it has been possible mainly thanks to the additional help of my two field assistants, Lina Peña-Ramirez and Grace Blackburn. The PSA Fieldwork Travel and Data Collection Award has been fundamental to cover the flight costs for a field assistant. Now I am closer to answer my research question, which I hope will contribute to our understanding of how wild animal populations might adjust to climate change and inform mitigation actions.

www.babbler-research.com

Earlier this year, just before the world began to understand the impact that Covid-19 would have on everyone, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the Lorne Conference on Protein Structure and Function in Melbourne. This conference is Australia’s most prominent annual academic event for protein biologists such as myself. The hot topics revolved around research outputs resulting from recent advancements in cryo-electron microscopy, a technique that allows scientists to see the intricate structures of proteins and other biomolecules.

I discussed my research on understanding why a particular protein undergoes a unique shuffling in its amino acid sequence, a phenomenon not observed in any other protein in nature. Like the human tailbone, this modification was thought useless and has therefore been largely ignored by most protein scientists. My research turns this 30-yearold assumption on its head, reminding us yet again that we should always be prepared to be proven wrong in science. Having worked on my project for what felt like three long years, it was invigorating to be amongst a group of people who were not only interested in the work that I have done but also positively excited at the potential questions that my research could answer.

As this was my first time attending a major conference, I was pleasantly surprised at how supportive the environment is for early career researchers and PhD students, as accomplished researchers were eager to share their life experience both on- and off-stage. The amount of exposure that I received has left me eagerly anticipating the next potential meeting. Perhaps the complete, high-resolution structure of the coronavirus responsible for Covid-19 will be one of the highlights then, on top of the surf lesson that the organisers arrange for participants every year!