The Family Life of Lizards – Geoff While
Time and Place
Thursday August 7th
7.15 pm for a 7.30 pm start
UTAS Sandy Bay Campus in the Law Building Seminar Room (Room 132)
See below for the venue details
About
Tasmania’s White’s Skink is part of a fascinating group of lizards which show remarkable diversity in their social lives. While individuals of some species live alone, individuals from other species form lasting pair bonds, raise offspring together, and may even live in large extended family groups spanning several generations.
For the past two decades, Geoff and his colleagues has been running a long-term field study of White’s skinks on rocky outcrops in Tasmania, tracking individuals over their lifetime to understand how their social relationships form, change, and persist across both space and time. This work has revealed striking variation in social behaviour, both between individuals and across populations.
In this talk, Geoff will share what this long-term Tasmanian research has taught us about the origins and evolution of family life in lizards. He will highlight how we combine our detailed field observations with neurogenomic approaches, targeted experiments, and broad-scale evolutionary analyses to uncover the factors shaping lizard family life – from the genes that regulate social behaviour at the individual level, to the environmental and historical forces responsible for the repeated emergence of social behaviour across deep time.
Non-members are welcome, and registration is optional.
If you think that the club is a good fit for you and you would like to regularly attend events then we ask you sign up as a member (https://tasfieldnats.org.au/member)
Venue
We use the rear entrance to the building and access is easy – from the corner of Grosvenor St and Alexander St (see red star and arrows on map) walk down the laneway on the northern side of the Law Building and enter via the sliding doors at the back of the building. There should be plenty of parking available close by along Grosvenor St just past View St or on Dobson Road which is one-way down (see green squares). Sometimes sports practice is taking a lot of the parking along Grosvenor Crescent by the oval. Bring a torch if you are worried about the footpaths.
On entry into the lower foyer please enter your name and phone number on the meeting attendance sheet. Access will be from 7.15pm.
Hope to see you there!
We acknowledge and pay our respects to the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we study natural history.