Dr James Nicholls 'Manipulation of Host Plants by Herbivorous Insects’

You are here

Thursday, 11 April 2019 - 12:30pm

James currently works at the Australian National lnsect Collection at CAIRO, and will talk about how parasitic oak gall wasps manipulate their host plants to produce unusual structures and compounds to gain higher quality nutrition and increased protection from predatory wasps.

Abstract

James, currently works at the Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC) at CSIRO, and will talk about how parasitic oak gallwasps manipulate their host plants to produce unusual structures and compounds to gain higher quality nutrition and increased protection from predatory wasps.

Biography

James came to Australian National Insect Collection at CSIRO after 11 years of post-doctoral work at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.  His previous work has involved genetic/genomic data to explore questions in insect-plant interactions, community assembly, phylogeography and taxonomy.  Much of his work has focused on oak gallwasps and the associated community of parasitoid wasps. However, he has also worked extensively on both birds (field-based behavioural work and DNA-based assessments of their diet) and plants (using genomic methods to address taxonomic questions, based at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh).  James is part of the team working on the Environomics Future Science Platform project “High-throughput Collection Genomics”, developing methods to obtain genomic-scale DNA sequence data from the specimens housed at ANIC, and hence facilitating the use of the collections as a resource for genetic research into Australian insects.