PhD in Ecology

Food passage time through animal guts is a critical parameter for constraining an animal’s ability to act as an agent of nutrient, seed, microbe, or pathogen dispersal in its ecosystem. Current methods to estimate food passage do not measure food directly, are impractical for many species, and often require unnatural conditions to administer. This new method directly measures the transit and retention times of plant foodstuffs by tracking isoptically-tagged greens from ingestion to plant biomarker excretion. In this project, you will take advantage of a newly piloted method to compare food transit time across a diverse array of plant eaters, focussed primarily on primates housed at the Twycross Zoo. This project is intentionally flexible: The research questions this method can address are numerous and varied, depending on your background and interests. We envision a first thesis chapter which builds a comparative database of food transit times across primates of various sizes with different feeding strategies that stem from different phylogenetic lineages, all to develop generalised empirical scaling rules about food transit and retention times within — and potentially beyond — primates.