Postdoctoral International Travelling Fellowship

Using custom underwater stereoscopic cameras and supervised machine learning approaches, this project aims to improve understanding on the relationships between cleaning interactions, species abundance and species diversity. By pinpointing if and when cleaning interactions breakdown, or are abandoned, we can better predict how reefs may respond to species loss. For this project’s fieldwork, I will be hosted by the Charles Darwin Foundation, a Galapagos based, non-profit organization dedicated to scientific research. I will be working with Dr Inti Keith who has worked in the Galapagos for over 10 years and leads the Foundation’s long-term Subtidal Ecological Monitoring Programme. This project is also supported by Dr James Herbert-Read from the University of Cambridge, and together we aim to quantify how cleaning interactions change across a natural gradient of species abundance and diversity.

Following on from this project, I aim to build in other interaction types (e.g. predation, competition and social interactions) to understand how they directly and indirectly interlink with cleaning interactions to create healthy and stable reef ecosystems.

In England, eradication of topmouth gudgeon has been implicated since 2005 to prevent its invasion and halt S. destruens (itself an IAS) spreading to native fish. However, a recent epidemiological model predicted that following eradication, S. destruens still persists in neighbouring fish communities. The generalist pathogen S. destruens can cause high, chronic mortalities in susceptible native fishes.

The research will be conducted in connected waterbodies to where parva has been eradicated when pathogen activity is peaked (spring and summer). If the parasite detected, pathological impacts on native fish hosts and infection levels will be evaluated. Later, specialist and generalist level of parasite will be determined

My role will be both on the field and laboratory. Including Water and fish samples will be collected from the related ponds. As well as, Quantitative PCR detection will be applied to water (‘eDNA’) and fish samples in the lab. Level of the parasite will be determined by culturing it.

Communities of fishes on tropical coral reefs are amongst the most diverse in the world, and they provide essential ecosystem services for hundreds of millions of people.

Coral reefs are being heavily degraded worldwide, and in response billions of dollars are being invested in projects that aim to restore coral habitat. These restoration programmes can regrow coral on a large scale, but the resulting impacts on fish communities and ecosystem services are poorly understood.

I will work with Dr Tries Razak, a global expert on coral reef restoration, to analyse existing time series and new observational data on how coral restoration shapes reef fish communities. We hope our findings will help managers to optimise reef restoration effects on fish community development and ecosystem functioning.

Development from a single fertilised cell to a feeding juvenile is common to all animals and constitutes a metabolically expensive period of early life that is vulnerable to environmental stress. For egg-laying species, temperature affects two processes that determine the “cost of development” – the rate of energy expenditure (metabolic rate) and the length of the developmental period from fertilisation until feeding (development time).

Within species, metabolic and developmental rates can vary considerably, even after accounting for temperature and body mass. For example, when placed under the same thermal conditions, individuals from cold-adapted populations can develop faster, compared with individuals from warm-adapted populations – yet maintain the same metabolic rates. The ability to maintain the same phenotype in the face of environmental change suggests that the thermal sensitivity of these traits is likely to have a genetic basis. The extent to which this apparent “decoupling” of the thermal sensitivities of developmental and metabolic rates is due to an adaptive (genetic), rather than an acclimation (plastic), response is yet to be determined.

Here I aim to disentangle the genetic and environmental effects of early life physiology to uncover a potentially general mechanism underlying adaptation to climate change in an ecologically important species, the three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus).

Investigating the impact of behavioural individuality and group size on leadership dynamics using genetically identical fish (Poecilia formosa) and the RoboFish

Grouping is vital for many fish species, and whilst we can explain the reasons for social behaviour across different contexts (for instance foraging efficiency or protection against predators), the behavioural mechanisms underlying collective behaviour are not fully understood. Computational models based on self-organization and ‘bio-hybrid’ approaches (e.g., experiments in VR environments) have helped identify the interaction rules that individuals follow when moving as part of a group. However, in the majority of models of collective behaviour it is assumed that individuals are identical in the behaviour rules they follow, something that is increasingly being proven not true by empirical findings. Individuals in a fish school may differ not only in their physical characteristics (i.e., body size) but also in their behavioural traits (‘personalities’). In this project, we aim to understand how the personality composition of a group affects its collective decision-making properties. Working with the team of Prof Dr Jens Krause, we will combine lab experiments, camera tracking and bio-mimetic robotics to study the collective motion of schools of Amazon mollies (Poecilia formosa), and their interaction with a robotic conspecific. The Amazon molly is a unique clonal fish; it has been shown that even genetically identical fish reared under near identical conditions develop behavioural individuality. Studying the response of Amazon mollies to a remotely controlled RoboFish therefore provides a unique opportunity to investigate the role of behavioural individuality on collective behaviour and leadership.