Current ABEL Members
Paul established the ABEL when he moved to UNE in 2010. He has worked on a range of projects over his career, but has long-standing interests in acoustic communication, sociality and adapting existing technology to ask new and exciting questions. He teaches first year biology, zoology and third year animal behaviour at UNE, as well as leading the Overseas Study Tour focusing on Botswanan Zoology. He was a past President of the Australasian Society for the Study of Animal Behaviour and a past member and Chair of the Research and Conservation Committee of Birdlife Australia. In addition, he is a Subject Editor of the Journal of Avian Biology and an Associate Editor of Emu: Austral Ornithology. Google Scholar profile.
Postdoctoral Research Assistant - Ahmad has returned to the lab to assist with surveys and catching and marking Noisy Miners across a range of sites on the Tablelands, helping out with a project looking at the impact of this increasingly abundant despot on the local avifauna.
UNE Postdoctoral Fellow – Julie will investigate how Noisy Miners interact using social networks, and explore the impact of communication strategies on helping behaviour.
Adjunct Researcher - Steve is one of Australia's premier raptor researchers, and has an impressive track record of publishing and commitment to ornithological research spanning decades. This expertise has seen him recently rewarded with a highly prestigious Serventy Medal from Birdlife Australia.
PhD candidate – Improving animal welfare in beef cattle.
PhD candidate – Camouflage of motion in lizards and snakes.
PhD candidate – Re-colonization dynamics of an aggressive species: understanding population movements through gene flow and sex ratio variation in the Noisy Miner (Manorina melanocephala). See here for more details on Farzaneh's project.
PhD candidate – The impact of sociality on communicative complexity and brain size.
PhD candidate – The interplay between Noisy Miners and raptors in woodland fragments.
PhD candidate - Ecoacoustics as a tool for biodiversity assessment
PhD student - Headstarting Bell's Turtles: can we enable hatchlings to avoid the predation bottleneck?
Honours student - fine scale behavioural impacts of the lethal management of Noisy Miners
For more information, contact Prof. Paul McDonald
