Kevin Oh

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation | CSIRO · Health and Biosecurity

The size and distribution of home ranges reflect how individuals within a population use, defend, and share space and resources, and may thus be an important predictor of population‐level dynamics. Eruptive species, such as the house mouse in Australian grain‐growing regions, are an ideal species in which to investigate variations in space use and...

The management of invasive species has been greatly enhanced by population genetic analyses of multilocus single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) datasets that provide critical information regarding pest population structure, invasion pathways, and reproductive biology. For many applications there is a need for protocols that offer rapid, robust and e...

Invasive rodents are a major cause of environmental damage and biodiversity loss, particularly on islands. Unlike insects, genetic biocontrol strategies including population-suppressing gene drives with biased inheritance have not been developed in mice. Here, we demonstrate a gene drive strategy (tCRISPR) that leverages super-Mendelian transmissio...

Recent studies have shown that the sensitivity of wild house mice to zinc phosphide (ZnP) in Australia is significantly lower than previously assumed, which may account for the reported variability in efficacy of ZnP baits used for broadacre control of house mice in grain-growing regions. Under laboratory conditions ZnP-coated grains with a new hig...

Invasive rodents, including house mice, are a major cause of environmental damage and biodiversity loss, particularly in island ecosystems. Eradication can be achieved through the distribution of rodenticide, but this approach is expensive to apply at scale, can have negative impacts (e.g. on non-target species, or through contamination), has anima...

Recent studies have shown the sensitivity of wild house mice to ZnP poison in Australia is significantly lower than previously assumed which may account for the reported variability in efficacy of ZnP baits used for broadacre control of house mice in grain growing regions. Under laboratory conditions ZnP-coated grains coated with a new higher dose...

Managing pest vertebrate species in Australia is a significant challenge for government, industry, research sectors and land-managers. Innovative tools such as genetic biocontrol offers decision-makers a potentially effective means of reducing the impact of pest species incursions. To determine the conditions for investment in genetic biocontrol, w...

Sexual signaling traits are often observed to diverge rapidly among populations, thereby playing a potentially key early role in the evolution of reproductive isolation. While often assumed to reflect divergent sexual selection among populations, patterns of sexual trait diversification might sometimes be biased along axes of standing additive gene...

Introduced rodent populations pose significant threats worldwide, with particularly severe impacts on islands. Advancements in genome editing have motivated interest in synthetic gene drives that could potentially provide efficient and localized suppression of invasive rodent populations. Application of such technologies will require rigorous popul...

Vertebrate wildlife damage management relates to developing and employing methods to mitigate against damage caused by wildlife in the areas of food production, property damage, and animal or human health and safety. Of the many management tools available, chemical methods (e.g., toxicants) draw the most attention owing to issues related to environ...

Invasive species are increasingly affecting agriculture, food, fisheries, and forestry resources throughout the world. As a result of global trade, invasive species are often introduced into new environments where they become established and cause harm to human health, agriculture, and the environment. Prevention of new introductions is a high prio...

For over two decades, genetic studies have been used to assist in the conservation and management of both Greater Sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) and Gunnison Sage-grouse (C. minimus), addressing a wide variety of topics including taxonomy, parentage, population connectivity, and demography. The field of conservation genetics has been trans...

Vertebrate wildlife damage management relates to developing and employing methods to mitigate against damage caused by wildlife in the areas of food production, property damage, and animal or human health and safety. Of the many management tools available, chemical methods (e.g., toxicants) draw the most attention owing to issues related to environ...

Invasive rodents impact biodiversity, human health and food security worldwide. The biodiversity impacts are particularly significant on islands, which are the primary sites of vertebrate extinctions and where we are reaching the limits of current control technologies. Gene drives may represent an effective approach to this challenge, but knowledge...

Invasive species pose a major threat to biodiversity on islands. While successes have been achieved using traditional removal methods, such as toxicants aimed at rodents, these approaches have limitations and various off-target effects on island ecosystems. Gene drive technologies designed to eliminate a population provide an alternative approach,...

When the same phenotype evolves repeatedly, we can explore the predictability of genetic changes underlying phenotypic evolution. Theory suggests that genetic parallelism is less likely when phenotypic changes are governed by many small-effect loci compared to few of major effect, because different combinations of genetic changes can result in the...

When the same phenotype evolves repeatedly, we can explore the predictability of genetic changes underlying phenotypic evolution. Theory suggests that genetic parallelism is less likely when phenotypic changes are governed by many small-effect loci compared to few of major effect, because different combinations of genetic changes can result in the...

Understanding the genetic underpinning of adaptive divergence among populations is a key goal of evolutionary biology and conservation. Gunnison sage‐grouse (Centrocercus minimus) is a sagebrush obligate species with a constricted range consisting of seven discrete populations, each with distinctly different habitat and climatic conditions. Though...

Sage-grouse are two closely related iconic species of the North American West, with historically broad distributions across sagebrush-steppe habitat. Both species are dietary specialists on sagebrush during winter, with presumed adaptations to tolerate the high concentrations of toxic secondary metabolites that function as plant chemical defenses....

Invasive species pose a major threat to biodiversity on islands. While successes have been achieved using traditional removal methods, such as toxicants aimed at rodents, these approaches have limitations and various off-target effects on island ecosystems. Gene drive technologies designed to suppress a population provide an alternative approach, b...

Mating behavior divergence can make significant contributions to reproductive isolation and speciation in various biogeographic contexts. However, whether the genetic architecture underlying mating behavior divergence is related to the biogeographic history and the tempo and mode of speciation remains poorly understood. Here, we use quantitative tr...

Phenotypic evolution and speciation depend on recombination in many ways. Within populations, recombination can promote adaptation by bringing together favorable mutations and decoupling beneficial and deleterious alleles. As populations diverge, cross-over can give rise to maladapted recombinants and impede or reverse diversification. Suppressed r...

Speciation depends on the (local) reduction of recombination between the genomes of partially isolated, diverging populations. Chromosomal rearrangements and generic molecular mechanisms in the genome affect the recombination rate thereby constraining the efficacy of (linked) selection. This can have profound impacts on trait divergence, in particu...

Vast improvements in sequencing technology have made it practical to simultaneously sequence millions of nucleotides distributed across the genome, opening the door for genomic studies in virtually any species. Ornithological research stands to benefit in three substantial ways. First, genomic methods enhance our ability to parse and simultaneously...

Estimating the fitness surface of rapidly evolving secondary sexual traits can elucidate the origins of sexual isolation and thus speciation. Evidence suggests that sexual selection is highly complex in nature, often acting on multivariate sexual characters that sometimes include non-heritable components of variation, thus presenting a challenge fo...

Sexual isolation resulting from differences in mate choice behaviors is a hallmark of rapidly-speciating lineages. When present, asymmetrical sexual isolation may provide insights into the mechanisms responsible for the evolutionary change in mate signaling traits. In particular, Kaneshiro’s hypothesis suggests that divergence in sexual characters...

Understanding the genetic architecture of traits involved in premating isolation between recently diverged lineages can provide valuable insight regarding the mode and tempo of speciation. The repeated coevolution of male courtship song and female preference across the species radiation of Laupala crickets presents an unusual opportunity to compare...

Social monogamy is nearly ubiquitous across avian taxa, but evidence from a proliferation of studies utilizing molecular paternity analysis suggests that sexual monogamy is the rare exception rather than the rule (Griffith et al. 2002). Efforts to explain the prevalence of extra-pair paternity (EPP) have largely focused on the potential fitness ben...

The evolution of mating signals and preferences assists speciation by facilitating assortative mating within diverging lineages, thereby closing down conduits of gene flow between lineages. However, sexual communication traits are frequently subject to stabilizing selection, suggesting that new variants will be selected against, thereby discouragin...

Male provisioning of incubating females can increase reproductive success by maintaining physiological condition of females and consistency of incubation. The effects of male provisioning on the maintenance of incubation temperature and embryo development should be particularly pronounced in environments where ambient temperature exceeds the tolera...

The social environment is a critical determinant of fitness and, in many taxa, is shaped by an individual's behavioral discrimination among social contexts, suggesting that animals can actively influence the selection they experience. In competition to attract females, males may modify sexual selection by choosing social environments in which they...

The house finch (Carpodacus mexicanus) has emerged recently as a model species in studies of sexual selection, reproductive physiology, population genetics, and epizootic disease ecology. Here we describe 17 highly polymorphic microsatellite loci for this species. In a sample of 36 individuals, we observed an average of 16 alleles per locus and het...

Divergent selection on traits involved in both local adaptation and the production of mating signals can strongly facilitate population differentiation. Because of its links to foraging morphologies and cultural inheritance song of birds can contribute particularly strongly to maintenance of local adaptations. In two adjacent habitats--native Sonor...

Mating between relatives generally results in reduced offspring viability or quality, suggesting that selection should favor behaviors that minimize inbreeding. However, in natural populations where searching is costly or variation among potential mates is limited, inbreeding is often common and may have important consequences for both offspring fi...

The origin of complex adaptations is one of the most controversial questions in biology. Environmental induction of novel phenotypes, where phenotypic retention of adaptive developmental variation is enabled by organismal complexity and homeostasis, can be a starting point in the evolution of some adaptations, but empirical examples are rare. Compa...

Extrapair mating strategies are common among socially monogamous birds, but vary widely across ecological and social contexts in which breeding occurs. This variation is thought to reflect a compromise between the direct costs of mates’ extrapair behavior and indirect benefits of extrapair fertilizations (EPF) to offspring fitness. However, in most...

Duration of developmental stages in animals evolves under contrasting selection pressures of age-specific mortality and growth requirements. When relative importance of these effects varies across environments, evolution of developmental periods is expected to be slow. In birds, maternal effects on egg-laying order and offspring growth, two proxima...

In species that produce broods of multiple offspring, parents need to partition resources among simultaneously growing neonates that often differ in growth requirements. In birds, multiple ovarian follicles develop inside the female at the same time, resulting in a trade-off of resources among them and potentially limiting maternal ability for sex-...

Choice of genetically unrelated mates is widely documented, yet it is not known how self-referential mate choice can co-occur with commonly observed directional selection on sexual displays. Across 10 breeding seasons in a wild bird population, we found strong fitness benefits of matings between genetically unrelated partners and show that self-ref...