The J Lab
Group Leader: Dr Michael Jennions

Contact
School of Botany & Zoology
Australian National University,
Canberra, ACT 0200,
Australia
Email

Welcome:  First, thank you for visiting our website. Good choice. We are a happy and extremely productive research group. We place a strong emphasis on creating a friendly working environment. If you thrive best in a winner takes all setting then we are not for you. If, however, you enjoy biology, like working with  animals and find evolution fascinating then read on. We value and strive for research excellence. Ultimately scientists are evaluated on what they publish - avoid the hype and just check out our publications . If you are considering a PhD or Post-doc and want to produce high quality work with a view to pursuing a career in biology then please get in touch.

What do we do? We are interested in  whole organism evolutionary biology, especially the evolution of behavioural and morphological reproductive traits. Our main focus is therefore testing sexual selection theory. The kinds of questions we ask are:

• Why is there a tight scaling relationship between body and genital size in some species?
• Is there a trade-off between diets that maximize mating as opposed to fertilization success?
• How does inbreeding affect sexually selected traits versus other traits?
• Why do females mate multiply?

We use a combination of:                                     Behavioural ecology experiments                     Breeding Designs (quantitative genetics)
                                                                                        Artificial Selection Experiments                         Meta-analysis of the literature

These studies incorporate the use of:             Acoustic monitoring devices                               Sound analysis
                                                                                        Immunological assays                                            Sperm assays
                                                                                        Dietary manipulations                                            Paternity analysis

We currently conduct research on:               Crickets    Fish    Fiddler crabs   (... and beetles soon)

Thanks again for visiting our web site. The silly stuff is here.
 

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