Environmental changes are occurring rapidly in modern aquatic environments, at a time of accelerating habitat loss but increasing demand for seafood products. Sustainable fisheries management thus requires a much better understanding of how living marine resources react to their constantly changing environment. Individual organisms sense things in their environment—both non-living factors like temperature and living things like predators—and use that information to make choices about their behavior. These individual choices then influence other individuals, affecting their survival and reproduction, and eventually shape the overall condition of the entire population. But for many key living marine resources, prediction of future responses to environmental change remains hampered by a lack of information about which environmental variables are direct agents of change (and why), versus which ones may not directly impact behavior and fitness.
The intern will be directly involved in laboratory experiments that meaningfully fill critical data gaps of larger projects that study the effects of stressors on fisheries resources. These stressors include fluctuating temperature or salinity, aquatic acidification, increased marine noise, changing ocean visibility (turbidity), or increases in artificial light at night. We have measured organismal responses to environmental and anthropogenic change using a wide variety of complementary approaches and technologies ranging from microscopes to satellites. These have included electrophysiological recordings, laboratory behavioral and physiological assays, videography and remote sensing, and biotelemetry. Targeted research species for these experiments vary, but typically involve species of commercial or recreational fisheries importance (finfish and crustaceans), or those that have strategic importance in their ecosystem (forage species).