SEMINAR: The timing of stress: understanding adaptation in changing environments

The Seminar: Given the prediction for the increase to both the frequency and intensity of natural disasters due to global climate change, it is becoming increasingly important that we understand the impact of past disasters so we may be able to better mitigate the effects of future ones. Using data from the first long term study of the recovery of a wild primate population to a natural disaster; I will discuss the synergistic relationship between nutrition, disease and stress in determining population recovery following a severe environmental change. I will then discuss how the conclusions of this research left me with two questions to answer: How might exposure to regular natural disasters shape behavioural adaptation in non-human primates in the long term? And how might humans respond to similar environmental stressors given our close genetic relationship? This seminar will outline these ideas through an exploration of how we can use evidence of short term adaptation to build testable predictions regarding long term adaptations to sudden environmental change in non-human primates. It will then look at how this work can be extrapolated to humans to better mitigate our own exposure to sudden changes in environmental condition.

The Speaker: In 2010, Alison received a Ph.D from The University of Calgary in Anthropology (with a primatology specialization). Her dissertation work examined the effects of a major hurricane on a howler monkey population in Southern Belize, specifically examining the roles of food supply, nutrition, stress hormones and parasitism in the recovery of this population. From 2009 - 2011, Alison lectured in both the Department of Anthropology at The University of Calgary and The Department of Sociologyand Anthropology at Mount Royal University in Calgary. In 2011, she was appointed lecturer in Biological Anthropology in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at The Australian National University. Currently, Alison is a Senior Lecturer and Head of Discipline in Biological Anthropology at ANU and an ARC DECRA fellow. Her current work builds on her previous research to explore how primates (human and non-human) adapt in the longer term to rapid and severe environmental change. She also conducts research projects on endangered primate species in Vietnam and Cambodia to understand how monkeys and apes adapt to different anthropogenic impacts including logging and poaching.