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Lab 531 Laboratory 531 Marine - Freshwater Marine - Freshwater - Terrestrial Edition 1 | June 2015 A new look Lab The lab is growing and as such, over the past few months it has been going through some changes. First and foremost, as part of the new naming system at UTS our lab is now 06.531 (formerly 5.20). The Fish Ecology Lab, run by Prof. David Booth welcomes Dr. Edd Hammill, Dr. Simon Mitrovic and Dr. Anne Colville who are now situated in Lab 531. With the new academics brings a whole new range of studious students and exciting science to be done! A big part of science is cross-disciplinary exchanges of ideas and collaborations. So say hello to your fellow lab neighbours because whether you’re freshwater or marine we’re all looking to understand different aspects of the world. IN THIS ISSUE • A new look lab • Dates for diaries • Meet the lab • Lab 531 in media • Recent publications This issue of the newsletter is primarily to introduce to everyone who is in Lab 531 and what they’re doing. There will also be news on Lab 531 exposure in the media, publications and upcoming conferences that may interest the Lab. Thank you and enjoy! Dates for diaries July 5-9 - AMSA Conference, Geelong (amsa.asn.au/amsa-2015-geelong) July 28-31 - ACRS Conference, Daydream Island (australiancoralreefsociety. org/conference) October 11-14 - ASFB Conference, Sydney (asfbconf.asnevents.com.au) November 23-26 - Australian Society for Limnology Congress 2015, Wellington NZ (nzawaterconference.com) February 9-2 (2016) - Species on the Move International Conference, Tasmania (speciesonthemove.com) Student awards and subsidies are available for these conferences, please visit the respective website for more information. If you have any feedback please send it to [email protected] with the subject “Newsletter feedback”. Professor David Booth David Booth is Professor of Marine Ecology at UTS, and president of the Australian Coral Reef Society. He has recently cracked the 100 paper mark on a variety of topics including; reef-fish ecology and climate change. He has extensively looked at anthropogenic impacts on fishes and fisheries, in the Caribbean, Hawaii, the Great Barrier Reef, and deep sea waters. He is also doing an ongoing study looking at how tropical fish travel down the East Australian Current past Sydney. shows intriguing results and a manuscript for publication is currently being written. Lastly, Selma is part of a vagrant species population study with KAUST: Preliminary results suggest that there is population structure for all loci among all populations. The data is being prepared for publications and will be presented at the upcoming ASFB conference in Sydney at UTS. Jack O’Connor • Ecology and genetics of weedy seadragons (since 2001) Jack is a PhD student currently doing fieldwork while visiting the Zoology Dept. of the University of Melbourne! Field work essentially entails diving at sites around Port Phillip Bay to look for newly recruiting Southern Hulafish (Trachinops caudimaculatus) which he then takes back to the lab to run olfactory response behaviour tests on to study the effects of polluted versus non-polluted sites. He wants to use ICP-MS to investigate their developmental history. However, at the moment there seems to be an unusually low level of recruitment, so fingers crossed more fish will eventually show up! He has a paper under review in Oecologia that details similar sensory ecology dynamics with coral-reef larvae in Japan and he is currently writing up the work that he did at the Port Stephens Fisheries Institute, on the ontogeny of sensory ecology and behaviour in estuarine-dependant fish. • Estuarine fish ecology, role of artificial structures in urban estuaries Nikki Bramwell Dave is currently working on a variety of projects: • South East Australian marine coastal fish vagrancy and range shifts under climate change (since 2001) • Deep sea: links with oil and gas industry to understand ecology of deeper water organisms and artificial infrastructure function • Long term monitoring of southern GBR coral reefs and fishes (since 1994) • Demograpnhy/ageing of iconic elasmobranchs Dave volunteers a lot of his time as an advocate of the marine environment, as president of the Australian Coral Reef Society and the Ocean Science Council of Australia (OSCA oceansciencecouncil.org which aims to be the Wentworth group of the oceans). He also hosts numerous public lectures, is an adviser to NSW and Federal politicians and has extensive media appearances to convey his work. Within UTS, he is on the steering committee for Sustainability Central (sustainabilitycentral.com.au) and a member of the ethics committee. Jennifer Donelson Jenni is currently in the final year of her research fellowship in the Fish Ecology Lab at UTS. At the beginning of 2015 she travelled to two international conferences to discuss her research. The conferences were “Coral Reefs of Arabia” in Abu Dhabi UAE and the “Association for the Science of Limnology and Oceanography” in Granada Spain. The past few months have been spent writing and invited review for Biology Letters on transgenerational acclimation to climate change. Early in 2015 she had a publication come out at Global Change Biology about transgenerational acclimation to global warming. Donelson JM and Munday PL (2015) Transgenerational plasticity mitigates the impact of global warming to offspring sex ratios, doi: 10.1111/gcb.12912. There was some media coverage for this research and an article in The Conversation (https://theconversation.com/climate-change-can-tip-the-genderbalance-but-fish-can-tip-it-back-39053). Selma Klanten Selma is part of several research projects with groups of researchers from Australia and Saudi Arabia. Her weedy seadragon population study is a collaboration with the Underwater Research Group and National Parks and Wildlife of southern NSW. Initial results suggest that this species has very low genetic diversity. In short, all individuals are exact copies of each other. This information is of incredible significance for the resilience of the species, implying the species may be prone to extinction. Preliminary results will be presented in a poster at the 2015 ASFB conference in October. Another population study looking at Rock cale, Aplodactylus lopodon, is a collaboration with KAUST, Saudi Arabia. The research cens CENTRE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY Nikki Bramwell is a final year PhD student in the Fish Ecology Lab whose research aims to describe trends in seagrass fish communities with distance from intertidal rocky reefs or platforms in Jervis Bay. At the moment she is preparing data files for analysis in PRIMER and PERMANOVA software packages. She has been working hard on separating her data into separate chapters for her thesis and piecing together the story. At the moment Nikki is attending writing strategy workshops and boot camps that will provide useful tips to help produce a thought provoking and concise thesis. Nikki is also preparing to present at the annual Ecological Society of America conference in August of this year in Baltimore, Maryland, USA which, this year is having its 100th meeting! It surely promises to be an exciting and relevant venture which will portray Nikki’s work to the masses. Below are photos from Nikki’s recent experiment, where habitat combination choices were offered to individuals of four estuarine fish species. After the trials all individuals were returned safely to their habitats. Above: Pipefish in choice experiment. Below: Returning pipefish to area where they were collected. FISH ECOLOGY Paloma Matis Graeme Poleweski Paloma is currently in her third year of a PhD. Her project focuses on tropical fish-habitat associations across latitudes and implications for range expansions. She has numerous study sites along the east coast of Australia including; the northern Great Barrier Reef, Southern Great Barrier Reef, Solitary Islands and Sydney. So far she has completed extensive field work and lab experiments and is now completing analysis and write up of some of this data for publication. Paloma’s work will contribute to our knowledge of how tropical reef fish species respond to different reef environments and which species may be more likely to succeed in a novel environment. Her findings will also further our understanding of how these species may cope in a future ocean with predicted impacts of climate change. Graeme completed his Honours (First Class) at UTS last year where he looked at the potential of tropical fish to persist year round in South-East Australian waters. He found some interesting results which he is now working on publishing and will be presenting at the ASFB Conference in October. In the meantime he is the Laboratory Technician for Dave Booth’s Fish Ecology Lab. This entails making sure the lab is in order (or getting there!), going on field work when necessary and putting together this newsletter. Graeme is interested keenly interested in aquaculture and the betterment of sustainable farming of fish. He is also volunteering one-two days a week at the Sydney Institute of Marine Science where he learns the ways of aquarium maintenance whilst having a picturesque outlook. Below: Paloma and her volunteer Davina collecting samples on SCUBA at the Solitary Islands recently. Alice Pidd Alice Pidd graduated from her BSc in Marine Biology in 2015 and she is currently offering her time as a volunteer across many project types (Honours, Masters, PhD) in the field and laboratory within the Marine Biology field. She already has work lined up with a few projects this year! Aside from volunteering she is in the process of publishing her Undergraduate Research Project with Professor David Booth and Dr. Edd Hammill, and is on the neverending hunt for employment as a Marine Biologist! Implications of her work so far will result in a published note, loads of varied volunteer experience, and a leg up in the direction of employment! Dr. Edd Hammill Abigail Irwin Abigail is a current Masters/Honours student from India! Apart from grumbling about the cold Australian winters, she is working on her project that involves structural enhancement of pontoons in Pittwater. She’s testing the effects of said enhancement by attaching two designs of artificial structures under the pontoons and monitoring changes in fish assemblages over time. She’s using private pontoons for her research and says one of the most difficult but interesting aspects so far has been getting the pontoon owners on board! She’ll be starting laboratory experiments at SIMS next month, testing for preference in habitat design along with specific component choices among different species of fish. She hopes this will help to model a cost-effective artificial structure that can be attached to established and/or new marine infrastructure thereby helping to enhance fish populations around Sydney. Shannen Smith Shannen is an honours student working with Dr. Jennifer Donelson, Dr. Rebecca Fox and Professor David Booth looking at competitive interactions between tropical vagrant species and temperate resident species. She is particularly interested in how behavioural strategies of tropical species change as temperature drops into winter and potential benefits of shoaling with temperate species in terms of body size, boldness and survival. Her study is focussed on two tropical species Abudefduf vaigiensis and Pomacentrus coelestis as they display different behavioural strategies in their native coral reefs. She is using behaviour and habitat information to work out their niche in the temperate ecosystems. This data will be used to make significant predictions about the impact of tropical species on their temperate counterparts if winter sea temperatures are consistently warm enough for over winter survival and population establishment. FISH ECOLOGY Before Dr. Edd Hammill arrived at UTS School of Life Sciences, he was a research fellow in the Hugh Possingham Environmental Decisions Group at the UQ. He remains associated with the Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions as well as the National Environmental Research Program’s Environmental Decisions Hub. Edd has a diverse area of research addressing fundamental questions in community ecology and ecosystem function. Edd adopts a holistic approach in his empirical research in order to obtain an overall measure of the state of an ecosystem. Currently, Edd is leading a project incorporating risk of military and civil conflict into reserve planning which is showing that smart decisions allow effective conservation under difficult circumstances. Quinn Ollivier Quinn’s research is focussing on sedimentary carbon storage within the GBR and how predator presence can shape sedimentary carbon distribution. Recent literature has identified reduced foraging distances in herbivorous fish species with presence of a predator, subsequently increasing the biomass of filamentous algae with distance away from fish refugia. Quinn’s thesis aims to identify the importance of predatory presence in the carbon storage of coral reefs by quantifying the sedimentary carbon along a transect moving away from reef edge. He hypothesises that areas outside fish foraging distances have higher carbon concentrations. Complimentary to this, he is currently identifying the community composition of bioturbatory species within the same distance from reef transects. This will help to identify how algal carbon is being transferred into deeper sediments, and which species in particular may be responsible for these variations in sedimentary carbon. cens CENTRE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY Ellery Johnson Ellery is the long haired yahoo you may have seen enjoying himself around the lab. He is currently typing up the undergraduate research project he has been undertaking with Dr. Edd Hammill. This has involved investigating the effects of ocean acidification on zooplankton communities in custom built Kriesel tanks (see pictures, right) at SIMS, with the report hopefully finished by late June. He has just signed on with Dr. Simon Mitrovic to begin Honours starting in the Spring 2015 semester. His project will investigate the influence of allocthonous carbon delivered by environmental flows to estuaries and its importance to estuarine zooplankton communities. This will hopefully help to promote the importance of environmental flows across NSW. Feel free to tell him to turn his music down in the labs if it annoys you or make a song request! Above: Close up view of Kriesel tank Right: Series of Kriesel tanks on racks at SIMS. Dr. Anne Colville Doctor Anne Colville has collected a pretty varied background over the years, including an Honours degree in Zoology and Biochemistry, with a project looking at pigmentation in fruit flies, followed by a Masters looking at neurophysiology of gut. She worked in pathology for several years (clinical chemistry, haematology and blood transfusion), and then came to work at the UTS Gore Hill campus (NSWIT as it was), running the Biochem labs. But she gave that up when she had kids, and taught at TAFE for some years. She then returned to UTS to do a Masters in Environmental Toxicology and finally discovered what she wanted to do when she grew up! Since her toxicology masters she has done a lot of work with Professor Richard Lim, doing toxicity testing on all sorts of things (pulp mill effluents, commercial preparations, hormones and endocrine disruptors on fish, and pesticides on macroinvertebrates), and some large ARC projects looking at endocrine disruptor effects in sewage outfalls and rivers. Anne did her PhD working with Richard Lim , and Ross Hyne from the EPA, looking at an insect growth regulator pesticide on macroinvertebrates. Lately Anne has been doing casual work on several projects, partly hands-on doing experimental stuff, partly assisting and supervising students, plus a certain amount of keeping the lab functioning and doing risk assessments etc. She also works with Simon Mitrovic and his group on cyanobacteria, looking at cyanobacterial toxins and their effects on plants and freshwater communities. Anne also works with Vigi Vigneswaran and his group in Engineering, who are looking at pollution assessment and water cleanup methods. Anne assists students to do toxicity testing on their polluted samples, and to confirm that their cleanup methods actually work. Anne has had a pretty busy career and is now looking forward to getting work happening with everyone in the new labs! Thuy Chung Nguyen Thuy Chung Nguyen is a PhD student from FEIT, UTS, doing part of her research in the Faculty of Science, under the supervisor of Professor Richard Lim and Doctor Anne Colville. Her research is looking at road-deposited sediment (RDS) pollutants and investigating different analytical techniques for mobility, bioavailability and remediation. This work is significant as RDSs can have major impacts on aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, through the volume of sediments transported into these environments and the potential for high levels of pollutants associated with the sediments. Thuy believes that this is a key element of urban pollution management - levels and potential mobility of the pollutants in RDSs are both monitored and actively managed to minimise their impacts. cens CENTRE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY Dr. Simon Mitrovic Doctor Simon Mitrovic does a range of work from algal bloom research, river management, food webs, allochthonous carbon and some ecotoxicology (especially with algal toxins). He is a Senior Lecturer at UTS but also works for the Office of Water as a Principal Research Scientist. Simon is constantly striving to bridge the gap between UTS and industry – hence he develops projects that are important for industry. Simon is also supervising about 7 post grads and 2 new honours students! Check out some of their work below. Rebecca Wood Rebecca’s PhD research focuses on assessing herbicide toxicity in rivers flowing into the GBR. Herbicides have been used extensively in GBR catchments resulting in widespread contamination that poses a potential threat to aquatic ecosystems, especially photosynthetic organisms such as benthic diatoms. Benthic diatoms have the potential to be used as bioindicators of herbicide toxicity in rivers. They are important primary producers in aquatic ecosystems, are widespread and diverse and highly responsive to changes in environmental conditions. For these reasons they are excellent indicators of ecosystem health. She is using a novel method called rapid toxicity testing, to shed light on the herbicide sensitivity of many local freshwater benthic diatom species. Her overall goal is to improve the management of herbicide pollution and produce a new biomonitoring tool capable of identifying herbicide toxicity in rivers. Rebecca’s supervisors are Simon Mitrovic (UTS), Richard Lim (UTS) & Ben Kefford (UC). Anne-Marie Rohlfs Ann-Marie’s PhD examines linkages between environmental flows, the dissolved organic carbon (DOC) regime and microbial structural and functional responses in the Snowy River below Jindabyne Dam. In particular she is focusing on the potential contribution of tributaries to the recovery of regulated rivers through supplying DOC. This study is a collaboration between UTS, Snowy Hydro Ltd, the NSW Office of Water and the Murray-Darling Freshwater Research Centre, and will inform management on the implications of using tributary versus dam water for environmental flows. Christian Moore Christian is a Masters student investigating the mitigation of cold-water pollution within the Murray-Darling Basin. In particular, he will be monitoring the effectiveness of the thermal curtain installed at Burrendong Dam in preventing the release of cold-water from the dam. The monitoring was formerly carried out by Masters student Rachel Gray (who is currently writing up). The purpose of the thermal curtain is to improve the thermal regime of the river downstream of the dam by returning it to a more natural state. This will improve the habitat quality of native fish for which the colder, dam altered thermal regimes are inappropriate. Proof of the effectiveness of the thermal curtain may lead to the installation of curtains at other large, cold-water releasing dams. The mitigation of cold-water pollution below a number of large dams within the Murray-Darling Basin could potentially restore nearly 3000 kilometres of river habitat for native fish. Lloyd Werry Lloyd is also working in the Snowy River looking at how climate change may influence macroinvertebrate communities of the Snowies. Sarah Meoli Sarah Meoli completed her Bachelor of Science in Environmental Biology and Environmental Protection last year and begins her honours mid-year with supervisor Dr. Simon Mitrovic and co-supervisor Dr. Anne Colville. Sarah’s honours project will examine the effects of lysates of toxin-producing and non-toxin-producing strains of cyanobacteria on various plants and zooplankton. If lysates are found to be much more toxic than a pure toxin in a sample it will mean the guidelines which are based on one toxin may not be adequate to protect humans. The Lab in the Media Hammill - “Global seabird decline greater than expected”, ABC Science News and a radio spot (17/06/2015). abc.net.au/science/articles/2015/06/17/4253305.htm Donelson - “Climate change can tip the gender balance, but fish can tip it back”, The Conversation and 2SER Radio (10/04/2015) theconversation.com/climate-change-can-tip-the-gender-balance-but-fish-can-tip-it-back-39053 2ser.com/terms-a-conditions/item/14397-spiny-chromis-fish-adapts-to-climate-change Booth - Dave appeared on a segment of Channel 7’s nightly 6pm news to discuss the warming ocean’s, in particular around Sydney and what this could mean for the ecology of marine habitats around Sydney. And it wouldn’t be a TV spot about tropical fish without come clips of Finding Nemo thrown into the mix (14/06/2015). CENTRE CENTRE FOR FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY SUSTAINABILITY cens cens Marine - Freshwater Laboratory 531 Recent Publications Booth Lab Liggins, L., Booth, D. J., Figueira, W. F., Treml, E. A., Tonk, L., Ridgway, T., Harris, D. A. and Riginos, C. (2015). Latitude-wide genetic patterns reveal historical effects and contrasting patterns of turnover and nestedness at the range peripheries of a tropical marine fish. Ecography. doi: 10.1111/ecog.01398 Poulos, D. E., Gallen, C., Davis, T., Booth, D. J., and Harasti, D. (2015). Distribution and spatial modelling of a soft coral habitat in the Port Stephens–Great Lakes Marine Park: implications for management. Marine and Freshwater Research. doi.org/10.1071/MF14059 Booth D., Gribben P. and Parkinson K. (2015). Impact of cigarette butt leachate on tidepool snails. Marine Pollution Bulletin. doi:10.1016/j.marpolbul.2015.04.004 Donelson J. and Munday P. (2015). Transgenerational plasticity mitigates the impact of global warming to offspring sex ratios. Global Change Biology. doi: 10.1111/gcb.12912 Hammill Lab Hammill, E., Atwood, T. B., Corvalan, P. and Srivastava, D. S. (2015). Behavioural responses to predation may explain shifts in community structure. Freshwater Biology, 60: 125–135. doi: 10.1111/fwb.12475 Runge, C. A., Tulloch, A., Hammill, E., Possingham, H. P. and Fuller, R. A. (2015). Geographic range size and extinction risk assessment in nomadic species. Conservation Biology, 29: 865–876. doi: 10.1111/cobi.12440 Hammill E., Kratina P., Vos M., Petchey O. and Anholt B. (2015). Food web persistence is enhanced by non-trophic interactions. Oecologia 178(2):549-556. doi: 10.1007/s00442-015-3244-3 Hammill E., Fitzjohn R. and Srivastava D. (2015). Conspecific density modulates the effect of predation on dispersal rates. Oecologia:1-10. doi:10.1007/s00442-015-3303-9 Hammill E., Atwood T. and Srivastava D. (2015). Predation Threat Alters Composition and Functioning of Bromeliad Ecosystems. Ecosystems:1-10. doi: 10.1007/s10021-015-9866-9 Mitrovic Lab Griffin, C.T., Mitrovic, S.M., Danaher, M. and Furey, A. (2015). Development of a fast isocratic LC-MS/MS method for the highthroughput analysis of pyrrolizidine alkaloids in Australian honey. Food Addit Contam Part A Chem Anal Control Expo Risk Assess 32(2): 214-228. doi:10.1080/19440049.2014.996789 Zhao, C., Liu, C., Dai, X., Liu, T., Duan, Z., Liu, L. and Mitrovic, S.M. (2015). Separation of the impacts of climate change and human activity on runoff variations. Hydrological Sciences Journal 60(2): 234-246. doi:10.1080/02626667.2013.865029 Zhao, C.S., Yang, S.T., Liu, C.M., Dou, T.W., Yang, Z.L., Yang, Z.Y., Liu, X.L., Xiang, H., Nie, S.Y., Zhang, J.L., Mitrovic, S.M., Yu, Q. and Lim, R.P. (2015). Linking hydrologic, physical and chemical habitat environments for the potential assessment of fish community rehabilitation in a developing city. Journal of Hydrology 523:384-397. doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2015.01.067 Westhorpe, D.P., Mitrovic, S.M., Growns, I.O., Hadwen, W.L. and Rees, G.N. (2015). Disruption in water quality patterns along the river continuum by a large bottom release dam. Australasian Journal of Environmental Management. doi:10.1080/14486563.2014.99 9133 Booth Hammill Colville Mitrovic fishecologylab.com eddhammill.com CB04.06.342 School of Life Sciences [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] cens CENTRE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY