PROF OLALEKAN FATOKI

The vision of the faculty of applied Sciences is to be the faculty of choice in science and technology, both nationally and throughout the rest of africa. This is aligned to CPUT’s vision to be at the heart of technology education and innovation in africa.

Among others, the faculty set the following goals in 2014 for research, innovation and postgraduate education:

• To promote a culture of research and innovation and to increase research output of academic staff

• To increase the number of postgraduate students, particularly at doctoral level, and to substantially increase their graduation rate

• To increase the number of research linkages and partnerships locally, regionally and internationally, especially in Africa.

We are proud of the fact that we managed to achieve these goals in 2014. In addition to producing the highest research output per capita, staff in the faculty also attracted substantial external funding for research.

We are also proud that the faculty gained eight more Associate Professors this year.

The Functional Foods Research Unit continued to shine. The Omega Caro-E product launched by this unit is now available in many pharmacies and supermarkets in South Africa. The product has also been approved for sale in Canada.

In the year under review, the faculty continued to actively participate in local, regional and international linkages established between CPUT and other universities, of which relevant examples include the Beijing Forestry University in China and the U6. The U6 is a consortium of six African universities founded in 2012 to promote collaboration between universities in Africa. I am proud to report that our faculty hosted a very successful U6 conference on behalf of CPUT on campus in September.

I would like to thank all staff and students in the faculty who have contributed to making a success of the 2014 research year.

CONFE r ENCE F u ND i N g (CONFCO m )

E x TE r NA l F u ND i N g

Sunbirds and flowers

Do sunbirds prefer white or pink flowers? This is the research question posed by Dr Sjirk Geerts, a CPUT Nature Conservation lecturer, as he explores foraging choices of nectar-feeding birds. The flower colour preference of bird species is a popular research area abroad, with a large amount of work being done on hummingbirds in the americas. Dr Geerts hopes to expand this area of research on the african continent, and his efforts have been documented in the journal evolutionary ecology. The study is the first of its kind in africa, and entailed Dr Geerts and several research partners focusing on the orange-breasted Sunbird and a plant called Erica perspicua, to determine which flower colour attracts these birds most. Dr Geerts is interested in the role birds play in shaping the evolution of the plant species on which they feed.

i ND u ST ry F u ND i N g as part of the study, the team set up an aviary, arranged an even number of pink and white flowers, and then let in sunbirds and monitored their movements. “once foraging, the birds always went to a pink flower first. However, thereafter they did not select a specific colour flower, but rather selected the closest flower. Minimisation of flight distances therefore overrides colour preference,” he said. This study also revealed that sunbirds help maintain the colour polymorphism (more than one flower colour form within a species), but what caused this diversity remains an unanswered question.

“The next step is to look at the genetics of polymorphic Erica species, which will hopefully bring us another step closer in unravelling the reasons for the high diversity of this plant species in the Cape,” said Dr Geerts.