Project 3: Social behaviour and disease ecology in Eastern water dragons (Post-doc 2, 2020-2021)

My second post-doc on urban Eastern Water dragons (EWD, Intellagama Lesueurii) allowed me to extend my research to new questions at the intersection between social behaviour, disease ecology, and urban evolutionary ecology. I kept developing my skills in variance partitioning approaches (e.g. using DHGLMMs), I also started to use social network analyses combined with simulations. In particular, I have been involved in a variety of collaborative projects such as i) Assessing the virulence, dynamics and survival costs of a recent emerging infectious fungal disease in EWD (with Shweta Bansal’s lab, Georgetown University, USA); ii) Modelling long-term social avoidances and their consequences for social network structure (with Amiyaal Ilany, Bar-Ilan University, IL); iii) Investigating the repeatability, predictability and fitness consequences of social behaviour in EWD (with Shinichi Nakagawa, UNSW, AU).