Has deforestation in Aotearoa forced native insects to change colour to ensure their survival? Can metals help solve a growing global antimicrobial resistance? How did the first Māori communities really engage with moa and what can we learn from that today?
All of these questions, and more, will be answered by University of Otago researchers who have been granted prestigious Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden grants.
Twenty-four Otago academics were today announced as successful in their bid for a 2022 Marsden grant, worth a total of about $19.8 million.
Twenty-one researchers and their teams were awarded standard grants, and four Fast Start grants which recognise emerging researchers.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research and Enterprise Professor Richard Blaikie offered his congratulations to the recipients of the highly competitive grants.
“This latest impressive performance continues the University’s strong record in gaining external research funding and reflects the ongoing strength of the University’s research culture,” he says.
Professor Jon Waters, of the Department of Zoology, has been granted $960,000 for his project to test for evolutionary changes in New Zealand’s animals linked to loss of forest – using native insects as a model system.
“By comparing the same species inhabiting both forested and cleared habitats – using a combination of genetic and ecological approaches – we hope to see if, and how, they have evolved in response to recent deforestation.”
A key question in biology concerns the ability of species to adapt to environmental change, he says.
“As the world changes fast, we need to understand the extent to which our wildlife can evolve in response to these new challenges.
“Internationally, perhaps the most famous example of rapid evolution is the case of the peppered moth in the United Kingdom, a species which quickly changed colour in response to pollution.
“In New Zealand, loss of forest is perhaps the most obvious and widespread human-driven environmental change. We suspect that deforestation has fundamentally shifted the evolutionary trajectories of many of our native species,” Professor Waters says.
Professor Richard Walter, of the Archaeology Programme, has been granted $870,000 to investigate how Māori communities interacted with moa.
“Aotearoa is possibly the only place in the world where it is possible to observe – archaeologically – the demise of a megafauna following interaction with humans. Despite the common cry that moa were hunted to extinction, we really have few clear ideas about what avian and human behaviours actually led to the demise of moa.
“Understanding this question will shine light on extinction problems worldwide,” Professor Walter says.
His team, which includes Dr Chanel Phillips (Ngati Hine, Ngapuhi), Co‑director of Te Koronga Indigenous Science Research Theme, will drawing on new data from archaeology and molecular zooarchaeology, and adopt the Māori principle of mahinga kai as the central framework of analysis.
“Our underlying principle is that moa hunting cannot be seen as an isolated practice but would have been a component of complex mahinga kai systems.”
Professor Gregory Cook, of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, has been granted $934,000 to research a world-wide health problem.
“Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a rapidly evolving global emergency that threatens many of the achievements of modern medicine. In 2019, the deaths of nearly five million people were associated with AMR bacterial infections and 1.27 million deaths were directly attributed to AMR,” Professor Cook says.
In the face of rising AMR and a dwindling supply of effective antibiotics, there has been a resurgence of interest in exploiting metals such as zinc for novel metal-based antimicrobials or as chemical adjuvants, which increase the efficacy of antibiotics, he says.
Professor Cook and his team has previously demonstrated that the zinc ionophore PBT2 can resensitise high-priority drug-resistant bacterial pathogens to multiple antimicrobials.
“This study will provide essential insight into driving the development of unique antibiotic adjuvants for breaking AMR and breathing life into antimicrobials that have become discarded due to widespread resistance. It will also provide a molecular framework for understanding AMR reversal more broadly in other bacterial pathogens.”
Nationally, 113 research projects were allocated almost $78 million in this round of Marsden grants.
