Alanna Collen (née Maltby)
PhD Student (completed)
Alanna Collen has now left ZSL.
- 2009: Bat expert for BBC’s expedition series Lost Land of the Volcano in Papua New Guinea.
- 2007-2012: PhD research student, Institute of Zoology and University College London.
- 2006-2007: MSc Advanced Methods in Taxonomy and Biodiversity, Imperial College London and Natural History Museum, London.
- 2006: Field work in Sinai Desert, Egypt for Operation Wallacea and BioMAP Egypt.
- 2005: Field work in Krau Wildlife Reserve, Malaysia for Malaysian Bat Conservation Research Unit.
- 2004-2005: Writer, www.ARKive.org .
- 2001-2004: BSc Biology, Imperial College London.
My PhD was on the evolution of echolocation in bats. Bats use a variety of sounds to help them navigate and acquire food within their night-time environments. The diverse range of habitats they occupy and the variation in their food sources are accompanied by a large range of echolocation call structures, each suited to the ecological demands on the bat species. Many of these call structures are functionally very similar but display variations that are identifiable as family ‘signatures’. I was interested in understanding the cause of the variety in echolocation call structure, as well as the evolutionary pathways that run from the ancestral state of echolocation to the current level of diversity.
My PhD was supervised by Dr Helen Chatterjee (University College London) and Dr Kate Jones (Institute of Zoology). I was funded by the NERC with IoZ as a CASE partner.