GELIFES Seminars - Simon Griffith

Simon Griffith (Macquarie University, Australia)

The Zebra finch

Lessons from the outback into a ‘model’ system

The zebra finch has been one of the most widely researched birds across a number of fields in ecology and evolutionary biology and most of this work has focused on laboratory-based birds in Europe and North America. I will present our research on wild zebra finches over the past 15 years covering sperm biology, reproductive ecology, social behaviour, and responses to a hot and extreme climate. The more I learn about the zebra finch, and Australian birds generally, the more I understand that they are very different from European species. The zebra finch is a real outlier amongst passerine birds, and it is those differences that have made them such a good species for captive work in the laboratory. That does raise some issues about the care that we need to take when using them as a ‘model’ system.

Biosketch
Simon is a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University, Sydney. He completed his PhD focused on sexual selection in the house sparrow in Terry Burke’s lab at the University of Leicester, UK, and then completed postdocs in Uppsala, Oxford and Imperial College, working on collared flycatchers, and blue tits before emigrating to Australia in 2004. His research program in Australia has focused on a variety of questions in evolutionary ecology and particularly with the Gouldian finch, long-tailed finch, and zebra finch, all of which he has studied in the laboratory and the field. You can read more about his research on his website.

Link to seminar