SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 7 - 9 may 2008
New Fellows Seminar
Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Professor Ian Hume
Emeritus Professor, School of Biological Sciences, University of Sydney
Ian Hume has a degree in agriculture and a PhD in ruminant protein metabolism from the University of Western Australia. After a postdoctoral fellowship and a temporary faculty position in the USA he returned to Australia to take up a lectureship in biochemistry at the University of New England (UNE) in Armidale. Over the next 14 years Ian built up a strong research group in comparative physiology and nutrition, and was awarded a DSc from UNE for his dissertation on the digestive physiology, metabolism and nutrition of marsupials. He took up the Challis chair of biology at the University of Sydney and became emeritus professor of biology in 2003. Ian is a life member of the Comparative Nutrition Society and the Australian Mammal Society, an editor of Journal of Comparative Physiology B, and has been a visiting professor at universities in Germany, Austria and the USA.
Comparative animal nutrition: Koalas, eucalypts, and global climate change
The koala is the most specialised of four marsupials that eat eucalypt foliage. Eucalyptus foliage is an unpromising food, with low ratios of nutrients to anti-nutrients, including terpenes (essential oils), phenolics, formylated phloroglucinol compounds and cyanogenic glycosides. A low basal metabolic rate (about half that of placental mammals of the same size) means that koalas have low requirements for energy and nutrients, low food requirements, and relatively low intakes of anti-nutrients. Body energy stores also last longer under adverse conditions. This allows koalas to specialise in eucalyptus foliage, but low ratios of nutrients to anti-nutrients mean that koalas must be highly selective about which eucalypt species to eat. Densities of koalas and other tree-dwelling species across the landscape reflect the nutrient status of trees in forests and woodlands. Global climate change is likely to affect koalas and the other eucalypt specialists by changing the species composition within forests and by exacerbating the low ratios of nutrients to anti-nutrients in eucalypt foliage.
