Publications by authors named "L G Rollins"
Article Synopsis
- Researchers studied yellow-spotted monitors, large varanid lizards in tropical Australia, finding they reach sexual maturity in under a year but have short lifespans, rarely living beyond 2 years for females and 4 for males, particularly before the arrival of toxic cane toads.
- The study revealed a faster life history for these lizards compared to other monitor species, with males growing rapidly during the wet season but facing high predation risk from pythons.
- The yellow-spotted monitors are vital to their ecosystem as apex predators, but their high feeding rates and communal nesting make food webs more susceptible to disruption from invasive cane toads.
EXPRESS: Eye Movements as Indices of Spatial and Associative Memory.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove)
November 2024
Previous research has shown that eye movements can serve as an indirect indicator of relational memory. The goal of the current research was to assess how eye movements coincide with different forms of spatial and associative memory. Young adults encoded object-scene combinations and were subsequently presented with repeated, novel, and manipulated scenes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- - The growth of human populations has led to the increase of invasive species around the world, making it crucial to study how their introduction and subsequent processes affect current diversity and structure.
- - The European starling, introduced to New Zealand in the 19th century, serves as a case study for examining genetic population structure and diversity through reduced representation sequencing.
- - Findings revealed limited gene flow within New Zealand's starling population, confirmed historical translocation events, and highlighted the importance of genomic analysis for understanding invasive species management and gene flow.
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has been widely used in genetics research for decades. Contamination from nuclear DNA of mitochondrial origin (NUMTs) can confound studies of phylogenetic relationships and mtDNA heteroplasmy. Homology searches with mtDNA are widely used to detect NUMTs in the nuclear genome.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFParasites may suppress the immune function of infected hosts using microRNAs (miRNAs) to prevent protein production. Nonetheless, little is known about the diversity of miRNAs and their mode(s) of action. In this study, we investigated the effects of infection by a parasitic lungworm (Rhabdias pseudosphaerocephala) on miRNA and mRNA expression of its host, the invasive cane toad (Rhinella marina).
View Article and Find Full Text PDF