A substantial decrease in restraint use occurred without an increase in serious injuries. Although minor injuries and falls increased, restraint-free care is safe when a comprehensive assessment is done and restraint alternatives are used.
Modelling distributions of arboreal and ground-dwelling mammals in relation to climate, nutrients, plant chemical defences and vegetation structure in the eucalypt forests of southeastern Australia. Forest Ecology & Management 85: 163-175.
Background: Differences between individuals in their gastrointestinal microbiomes can lead to variation in their ability to persist on particular diets. Koalas are dietary specialists, feeding almost exclusively on Eucalyptus foliage but many individuals will not feed on particular Eucalyptus species that are adequate food for other individuals, even when facing starvation. We undertook a faecal inoculation experiment to test whether a koala's gastrointestinal (GI) microbiome influences their diet. Wild-caught koalas that initially fed on the preferred manna gum (Eucalyptus viminalis) were brought into captivity and orally inoculated with encapsulated material derived from faeces from koalas feeding on either the less preferred messmate (E. obliqua; treatment) or manna gum (control). Results: The gastrointestinal microbiomes of wild koalas feeding primarily on manna gum were distinct from those feeding primarily on messmate. We found that the gastrointestinal microbiomes of koalas were unresponsive to dietary changes because the control koalas' GI microbiomes did not change even when the nocturnal koalas were fed exclusively on messmate overnight. We showed that faecal inoculations can assist the GI microbiomes of koalas to change as the treatment koalas' GI microbiomes became more similar to those of wild koalas feeding on messmate. There was no overall difference between the control and treatment koalas in the quantity of messmate they consumed. However, the greater the change in the koalas' GI microbiomes, the more messmate they consumed after the inoculations had established. Conclusions: The results suggest that dietary changes can only lead to changes in the GI microbiomes of koalas if the appropriate microbial species are present, and/or that the koala gastrointestinal microbiome influences diet selection.
Near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy has been used to answer a wide variety of questions in wildlife and biodiversity research. Whereas agricultural systems and manufacturing seek to limit variation in production systems, wildlife and biodiversity research must embrace it. Variation amongst individuals is the material on which natural selection operates and NIR spectroscopy provides a means to catalogue this variation and to use it in broader ecological and evolutionary analyses and for practical conservation outcomes. In this review we describe how NIR spectroscopy has been applied in wildlife and biodiversity research to obtain data that we could not obtain otherwise. Here we describe a range of applications for which NIR spectroscopy has been applied to questions in taxonomy, physiology, habitat evaluation and population monitoring and highlight new approaches that will allow NIR spectroscopy to be used more widely in wildlife and ecological studies.
Somatic mutations can have important effects on the life history, ecology, and evolution of plants, but the rate at which they accumulate is poorly understood and difficult to measure directly. Here, we develop a method to measure somatic mutations in individual plants and use it to estimate the somatic mutation rate in a large, long-lived, phenotypically mosaic
Eucalyptus melliodora
tree. Despite being 100 times larger than
Arabidopsis,
this tree has a per-generation mutation rate only ten times greater, which suggests that this species may have evolved mechanisms to reduce the mutation rate per unit of growth. This adds to a growing body of evidence that illuminates the correlated evolutionary shifts in mutation rate and life history in plants.
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