A new course at the University of New England is giving students experience in the training of dogs used in a variety of working contexts.

A residential school at UNE last week for those undertaking the course by distance education had the students working with beagles in training routines for quarantine detector dogs (as pictured here), and seeing demonstrations by dogs trained to detect termites in buildings.

“It was the best residential school ever,” said one of the students, Kelly Walton from Sydney. “I’ve always loved animals, and have had dogs since I was nine.”

Kelly, who is studying for a Bachelor of Science degree majoring in Zoology, interrupted a career in television production to follow her interest in animals. She and her fellow students agreed that the new unit – “Working Canines” – was opening up new options for careers with animals. “I’d really like to work in animal welfare one day,” Kelly said.

The “Working Canines” unit is part of the Bachelor of Animal Science degree program introduced at UNE this year, and it is also available – as an elective unit – to students in related degree programs. The Bachelor of Animal Science program has three specialist majors: Livestock Production, Wildlife Management, and Canine and Equine Science, with the Canine and Equine Science major being the first of its kind in Australia.

Geoffrey O’Neil, the quarantine dog handler who conducted the detector dog training sessions, said: “We’re putting what the students are learning into a real operational context, and giving them some ideas about employment opportunities.” It was Mr O’Neil’s wife, Alix O’Neil, who demonstrated termite detection with her own Labradors that travelled with them from Sydney.

“These students will be well prepared for employment,” Mr O’Neil said, “and the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service, for example, could potentially recruit graduates who have already done a lot of the training the Service would otherwise have had to put them through.”

During the four-day residential school, the students also travelled to a farm to see a sheep dog demonstration, to the Armidale Greyhound Racing Club to see racing greyhounds in training, practised obedience training with dogs of mixed breeds, and saw a sled dog demonstration by Neen Brown – a local woman who is the only Australian ever to have entered the Ititarod event in Alaska.

“There’s a wide range of uses for detector dogs,” said Dr Wendy Brown, the UNE Senior Lecturer who coordinates the Canine and Equine major of the Bachelor of Animal Science degree program, “and it’s expanding. There’s a big demand for expert dog handlers in customs, military, police and corrective services, and attention is now turning to the use of dogs in fields such as wildlife conservation and cancer detection. There’s actually a world-wide shortage of detector dogs, so there will definitely be a role for our graduates in the future.

“We’ve had positive feedback from people in the relevant industries, and they’re keen to employ people with this kind of training – training that hasn’t been available at tertiary level until the introduction of this course.”

Eight UNE scientists travelled to Melbourne at the end of July, to join about 2,000 others from around the world for the 18^th International Botanical Congress.

After the Congress, Associate Professor Jeremy Bruhl (the Director of the N.C.W. Beadle Herbarium at UNE) and Ian Telford (The Herbarium’s Curator and a PhD student in Botany) conducted an international group of 10 botanists on a three-day field trip through a wide range of ecosystems in the Northern Tablelands and North Coast of NSW.

The trip ended at UNE, where most of the visitors made use of the Herbarium for their research.

One of them, Dr Lutz Kunzmann, Head of Palaeobotany at the Senckenberg Natural History Collections in Dresden, Germany, was particularly interested in the conifers he saw during the field trip. As a palaeobotanist, Dr Kunzmann studies the fossils of conifers that became extinct in northern Europe about 110 million years ago. In northern NSW he saw – for the first time – close relatives of those extinct European conifers growing in their natural habitats.

“We saw conifers in a diverse range of habitats on the field trip,” he said, “and in different stages of development – from saplings to large trees.” He told Dr Bruhl that the trip had given him some important ideas for further research.

At UNE, Dr Kunzmann saw specimens of Australian native conifers growing around the campus, and is pictured here (at left) with Dr Bruhl inspecting a Queensland Kauri (Agathis robusta) growing just outside UNE’s Botany building.

Professor Gene E. Likens, famous for his discovery of the impact of acid rain in North America, is to give a public lecture at the University of New England about the water-related challenges facing the world.

“Solving the world’s water needs represents one of human society’s most urgent problems, given the critical role of water in the world’s economies, politics and general biotic wellbeing,” he says.

Professor Likens (pictured here) is on a two-week visit to UNE, where his host is Professor Martin Thoms, an internationally recognised expert on riverine ecosystems. The public lecture, titled “Water: The challenging interface between scientific understanding and policy”, will be in UNE’s Arts Theatre (Arts Lecture Theatre 1) at 6 pm on Thursday 25 August.

Professor Likens played a vital role in identifying the relationship between sulphur dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and acid rain. In recognition of his contribution to science, he received the US National Medal of Science in 2002 and, in 2003, the Blue Planet Prize (with F.H.Bormann) awarded by the Asahi Glass Foundation. He has won several other major awards, including the Australia Prize for Science and Technology (now the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science) in 1994. He was responsible for establishing two major research centres – the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study and the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies – in the United States.

“Major issues of human-accelerated environmental change currently affecting our planet include global climate change, stratospheric ozone reduction, land-use change, loss of biodiversity, invasion of exotic species, pollution of the biosphere, and infectious disease,” Professor Likens said.

He pointed out that all these factors were having an impact on the world’s inland waters. “There is a clear and urgent need to resolve the conflicts of use and abuse of aquatic ecosystems within the context of our planet’s finite freshwater resource,” he said. “Serious water shortages and water-quality problems have occurred in many areas around the world. And there are new water problems on the horizon – including contamination by antibiotics, steroids, hormones, other pharmaceuticals, and nanoparticles.”

In addition to being elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, Professor Likens has been elected to membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is also an Honorary Member of the British Ecological Society.

Everyone is welcome to attend the free lecture on Thursday 25 August by this eminent scientist, educator, and science adviser.

Scientists from the University of New England will be running a series of insect identification workshops for agronomists and grain growers in northern NSW over the coming weeks.

The workshops form part of a free insect identification service – The Sweep Net Northern NSW Pest Identification Service – provided by UNE’s Insect Ecology Laboratory with funding from the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC). The service includes up-to-date information on insect identification, integrated pest management (IPM) and current pest situations through The Sweep Net Web site (www.une.edu.au/sweepnet) and blog (http://blog.une.edu.au/thesweepnet/).

“Being able to accurately identify insects within cropping systems is essential if we are to make cost-effective and sustainable pest management decisions,” said Rachel Waugh from the Insect Ecology Laboratory.

Ms Waugh (pictured here) will host an insect identification workshop at Coolah on Wednesday 24 August and at Spring Ridge on Tuesday 6 September. Both workshops will run from 9 am till lunch time. Workshops are also planned for Gunnedah in mid-September and Armidale in late September.

Participants in the workshops will be given an introduction to insect biology, taxonomy and identification techniques, along with an overview of the insect Orders that are of agricultural significance. There will also be discussion about the roles of insects within the ecosystem, and about issues of relevance to IPM in broad-acre cropping.

“Along with cultural techniques such as insect-resistant cultivars of plants and crop rotation,” Ms Waugh said, “a key aspect of IPM is the retention of beneficial insects within a cropping system. This can be achieved through the strategic use of selective insecticides where they are available, and correct insect identification is imperative in that decision-making process.”

“In addition to these planned events, we’ll be encouraging expressions of interest for insect identification workshops targeted at specific grower or agronomy groups within northern NSW,” she said. In-house workshops have already been given to Landmark agronomists in Gunnedah and Moree.

The workshops are free for grain growers and agronomists working in the northern NSW grains industry. For more information – including the venues of all the workshops and the dates and times of those in Gunnedah and Armidale – or to register interest in attending one of the workshops, contact Rachel Waugh on (02) 6773 2338 or 0457 522 509 or e-mail: Insect.ID@une.edu.au.

A team of scientists will soon start working with sheep meat producers in NSW and Victoria to develop integrated worm control programs that will lift the limits imposed by worm infection on sheep meat production systems.

Led by the University of New England, the team will also include researchers from the University of Melbourne, Charles Sturt University, and the Central Livestock Health and Pest Authority.

“Worms represent the Australian sheep industry’s highest animal health cost,” said the leader of the project team, UNE’s Dr Lewis Kahn, “with most of that cost being in lost production rather than the cost of control. The value of sheep and their products has increased considerably, so losses due to worms have become greater. In the New England region, where sheep are susceptible to infection by barber’s pole worm, worms cost the industry about $11 per head every year.”

Supported by Meat & Livestock Australia, the project aims to develop regional worm control programs that will help to lift sheep meat production while slowing the development of drench resistance.

“At the moment, the sheep industry is faced with a growing incidence and severity of drench resistance,” said Dr Kahn, who is an Associate Professor in UNE’s School of Environmental and Rural Science. “And eliminating unnecessary drench treatments in the process of reducing reliance on drenches is also important in the context of consumer demands.”

Work will begin this spring on the three-year project, which will focus on the New England, Central West and South West regions of NSW and the North East and Western districts of Victoria. Initially involving nine farms, this number will increase to more than 50 over the course of the project.

“One aim of the project is to develop industry engagement with sheep health advisers and their clients so as to reduce the time it takes to translate research into on-farm adoption,” Dr Kahn said. “In the longer term, broader-scale adoption of the worm control programs will be aided by a delivery network and training materials being established by the Cooperative Research Centre for Sheep Industry Innovation (which is based on the UNE campus in Armidale) as part of the ‘WormBoss’ program developed over the past six years for the Australian wool industry.”

Fiona Fishpool, a research student at the University of New England, has developed a reliable method of measuring an individual grazing animal’s intake of dietary supplements.

Fiona (pictured here) has shown that the oral worm drench Fenbendazole, when included in a lick block containing feed supplements, emerges in blood samples as a reliable marker of the amount of the block – and therefore of the supplements – that an animal has eaten.

“We can tell from the blood samples just how much of a block each animal has eaten,” she said. “This has been quite difficult to determine until now.”

“It gives us an opportunity to understand not only how much, but why animals eat supplements,” she continued. “Using this technique, I’ve found that sheep are more driven to look for feed supplements when they have a worm infection.”

Fiona explained that Fenbendazole had a number of advantages over other markers of supplement intake, which had proved difficult to work with: it is non-toxic, can be added to any supplement mixture, does not create aversion to the lick block, and does not degrade in the paddock.

“This is a new tool for researchers exploring feed supplements,” said the principal supervisor of Fiona’s PhD project, Associate Professor Lewis Kahn from UNE’s School of Environment and Rural Science. “It’s a technique – unlike others – that can be used over a long period.”

Fiona’s project has brought her success not only in the field but also in the academy: at a recent conference of the New Zealand Society of Animal Production at Invercargill, NZ, she won the Young Member Award for her paper titled “Fenbendazole as a possible marker of supplement intake in sheep”. With only six months to go before she completes her PhD thesis, she’s focusing on that while considering her options for a career in research – a career that’s already off to a promising start.

Scientists and industry representatives from around the world met at the University of New England this week for the University’s biennial “Recent Advances in Animal Nutrition – Australia” conference.

Coming from about a dozen countries, including Iran, Egypt, Malaysia, the Philippines, India, China, Fiji, The Netherlands, Singapore and the United States, they discussed ways of improving the nutritional efficiency of animal production while reducing its impact on the environment.

“The central feature of this conference is that greenhouse gas emissions, environmental pollution, nitrogen recycling and biofuel production are emerging as drivers of the livestock research agenda,” said Dr Pierre Cronjé (pictured here), Chair of the organising committee.

A major theme of the conference was feed conversion efficiency. “In the past, feed conversion efficiency has been pursued mainly because of the related cost benefits,” Dr Cronjé said. “Now, however, the emphasis is shifting to its environmental benefits in reducing emissions and effluent.”

“It is evident that improvement of feed conversion efficiency has risen to the top of the contemporary research agenda,” he said, “and the contributions to this conference show that the livestock industry is eminently capable of increasing the supply of animal products without harming the environment notwithstanding the dwindling availability of feed grains.”

The biennial “Recent Advances in Animal Nutrition – Australia” conference has been held at UNE for the past 34 years. It is unique in Australia in facilitating interaction between the commercial and research sectors of the animal nutrition community and promoting discussion and debate on recent advances and future trends in animal nutrition. “It’s where science and industry come together,” said UNE’s Professor of Animal Nutrition, Roger Hegarty, noting that some of the delegates had been attending “Recent Advances” conferences for the past three decades, and one delegate had actually been to every one of them.

Another major theme of this year’s conference was feed additives in animal nutrition – in the interests of production efficiency, food quality, and the reduction of emissions. One paper dealt with the use of garlic oil in the diet of lactating buffaloes to reduce methane emissions. “A range of natural products, including essential oils, is gaining favour in reducing emissions,” Dr Cronjé said.

“Ruminants produce methane, which has implications for global warming,” said Dr Hink Perdok from the global feed company Provimi Holding, who travelled from The Netherlands to the conference. “By nutritional means we can solve that problem.”

The discovery by scientists from the South Australian Museum and the Universities of New England (UNE) and Adelaide that some ancient, primitive animals had highly-developed vision has brought new insights into the ‘Cambrian explosion’ of life half a billion years ago.

The evidence comes from exquisite fossils from Kangaroo Island in South Australia that are over 500 million years old, yet are so well-preserved that they look like eyes from a recently-swatted fly.

The discovery, revealed today in the prestigious journal
Nature, was made by an international team of palaeontologists led by Dr Mike Lee, from the South Australian Museum and University of Adelaide, and Dr John Paterson of UNE’s School of Environmental and Rural Science.

Dr Paterson explained that modern insects and crustaceans have ‘compound eyes’ consisting of hundreds or even thousands of lenses. They see their world as pixels, with each lens producing a pixel of vision. More lenses means more pixels and better visual resolution. The fossil compound eyes have over 3000 lenses, making them more powerful than anything previously known from that period and similar to the eyes found in many insects living now, such as robberflies.

‘These fossils represent the oldest complex eyes on the planet,’ Dr Paterson said. ‘The only others known in the fossil record from this time are either very simple trilobite eyes or circular blobs.’

‘The eyes we’ve discovered belonged to an arthropod – a big group which includes insects, crustaceans and spiders – and are preserved in a way that the optical design and lens arrangement is clearly visible, enabling to us to understand how Cambrian animals could see and perhaps how they lived.’

The arrangement and size of the lenses suggests that the eyes belonged to an active predator that was capable of seeing in dim light. The findings suggest that sharp vision must therefore have evolved very rapidly, soon after the first predators appeared during the ‘Cambrian explosion’ of life that began around 540 million years ago. It is possible that sophisticated vision in early predators drove a Cambrian ‘arms race’ when animals evolved armour (e.g. shells) at a rapid rate.

As the eyes were found isolated, their owner is unknown, but they possibly belonged to a large shrimp-like animal.  The 515 million-year-old rocks containing the eyes also preserve a dazzling array of marine creatures, many new to science. They include primitive trilobite-like creatures, bizarre armoured worms, and large swimming predators with elaborate feeding appendages.

The discovery provides further evidence that the ‘Cambrian explosion’ involved rapid innovation in fine-scale anatomy as well as major body architecture in animals, and is consistent with the idea that the development of advanced vision helped to drive this great evolutionary event.

Dr Paterson added that although the find was not expected, excavation has been taking place at the Kangaroo Island site since 2007. ‘Early on we were finding eyes attached to other animals but with no detail, just blobs. But these took us by surprise: normally the lens detail isn’t there.’

A key question has been how the eyes came to be preserved and fossilized in such detail. ‘Arthropods shed their corneas, which are made of material called chitin, similar to the thin, semi-hard exoskeleton you find on shrimps today,’ Dr Paterson said. ‘We suspect that, at a very early stage of fossilization, a compound called calcium phosphate replaced the chitin. Very specific conditions are needed for this reaction to take place, and the sediments must have been deposited under very low oxygen conditions, which both slowed decay and allowed this chemical reaction to take place.’

Dr Paterson said that, subject to funding, further excavations at the Kangaroo Island site were planned.

UNE is providing innovative training to African agriculture advisors and public sector staff to develop much-needed solutions to farming and water problems in their home countries.

In a project sponsored by AusAID, the Federal Government’s overseas aid program, UNE is providing training to over 40 public sector staff involved in agricultural extension research and training in the areas of post harvest storage and processing, and water harvesting and small scale irrigation.

Currently on campus in Armidale are participants are from Burundi, Ghana, Tunisia, Djibouti and Rwanda, with others from Burkina Faso and Egypt having completed training which began in May.

While the original idea for the project had centred on a study tour to expose participants to Australian methods, the UNE team, headed by Professor John Gibson, felt participants not only needed to leave with new skills and perspectives but action plans they could implement practically.

‘While our training provides some key technical information, the focus is on equipping participants with the tools they need to be effective at driving change in their home countries,’ Project co-leader, Dr Julian Prior said. ‘To help do this we are training the participants in agricultural extension techniques and also exposing them to the lessons that can be learned from the experiences of Australian Landcare.

‘A crucial component here is adaptive learning approaches, built around problems and case studies brought by the participants. This means things change as we go along and we ourselves learn what is needed. But the whole thing is aimed at ensuring that each person can leave with a well defined action plan which can be practically implemented.’ He added that an important result of the program was the sharing of solutions already in use elsewhere in Africa by other participants in the program, which been an ‘eye-opener’ for some.

The study tour has also been refined to maximise participants’ building of a network of highly relevant contacts in Australia. Follow up visits by UNE staff would help ensure that action plans developed were working.

‘We are also keen to recognise the central role of women in many agriculture systems and the particular value – in terms of improved health, education and livelihoods – of targeting interventions to women and improving the role of women.’ Dr Prior said. ‘Gender analysis and mainstreaming of gender strategies will be embedded in the training.’

Jacob Zuttah from Ghana’s Irrigation Development Authority came to find out how to understand basic principles of small-scale irrigation in his country’s drier areas and said this could make a big difference to Ghana’s ability to feed its own people. ‘At present we import 80 per cent of our rice needs from Thailand,’ he said. ‘This project will help me to go back home and help design simple, farmer-friendly water harvesting systems for agriculture that we don’t currently have.’  Ibtissem Enneb, a researcher in Tunisia’s Arid Regions Institute, agreed, saying that she was also finding new ways to transfer technology and training to farmers.