DUNG BEETLES IN BIOLOGICAL INVASIONS

A paper with my friend Daniel de Paiva Silva and three other co-authors from Spain, Brazil and the US, just came out in the journal Biological Invasions. It was my first 'adventure' into niche modelling and invasive species, and we investigated the invasion history of the dung beetle Onthophagus taurus (originally from around the Mediterranean Sea), a species that was introduced deliberately and accidentally in the Eastern and Western USA and Eastern and Western Australia. Check out the paper at the Biological Invasions website here. I normally use O. taurus as a model for behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology studies, and it was great fun to be involved with a study about the ecological niche and distribution of this amazing species of dung beetle.