How are animals adapted to survive and reproduce successfully? This is the central question of my research work and we tackle the question by studying particular examples of adaptations that are manifest in an animal’s behaviour or body form (morphology).

Tooth wear

A major project funded by NERC has studied the relationship between tooth wear in fish and what they eat. Once established the method can be used to deduce the diet of fossil and living fish without knowing anything about what the fish have in their stomachs.

The assumption underlying this work is that fish will be adapted to finding and eating a restricted subset of food organisms. Once chosen and eaten these food items will leave a unique signature in the form of scratch patterns on the fish’s teeth. The first experiments to demonstrate the viability of the method were done with threespined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) but we have also studied tooth wear in perch (Perca fluviatilis) and the bowfin (Amia calva). This work has been done in collaboration with David Baines and Dr Mark Purnell from the Department of Geology and Mike Bell from Ecology and Evolution, SUNY USA.

Information gathering

A major interest has been the way in which individual fish respond to others in their immediate vicinity during their everyday tasks of finding food or choosing where to be in the habitat. We find that fish make decisions about what to do based on information gathered directly from the habitat or from observing what other individuals do in the same situation. This work, now complete, was done in collaboration with Dr Ashley Ward from the University of Sydney and Dr Michael Webster from the University of St Andrews.

Why sticklebacks?

The threespined stickleback has long been a species of interest to scientists interested in behaviour but the species is fast becoming a model species for the study of a wide range of fundamental evolutionary problems such as the genetic basis of morphological variation in vertebrates and of the genetic and ecological basis of speciation. The 7th International Conference on the Evolution and Behaviour of Sticklebacks, co-sponsored by the Fisheries Society of the British Isles, was held in Leicester over 12-17 July 2009.

The fishing industry

I am also interested in the adaptations humans have to their social environment, particularly in fishers exploiting marine resources. Knowledge of in-built adaptations to the social environment will contribute towards the design of more effective resource management strategies. This work is being done in collaboration with Dale Rodmell and Dr Magnus Johnson, both at the University of Hull and through an EU funded project coordinated by CEFAS at the Fisheries Laboratory, Lowestoft.

The focus of our study in Yorkshire is the inshore shellfish fishery. The EU project will continue a collaboration with the South Devon and Channel Shellfishermen Ltd. This organisation represents crab fishers working around Start Point and previous work in this area studied the fishery itself and the conservation effects of an area closed to towed gear such as trawlers and scallop dredgers. This work was done in collaboration with Robert Blyth-Skyrme (now at Natural England), Michel Kaiser and Gareth Edwards-Jones at the University of Wales, Bangor.

Seamounts

A final interest is in the ecology and fisheries of seamounts. I am particularly interested in their biogeography and in their role as centres of biodiversity in the open ocean.

The research we do uses a combination of experimental work in the laboratory, field observation and the development of mathematical models to capture the essential features of the systems we study. Models are based on various mathematical constructs including game theory, stochastic dynamic programming and genetic algorithms.
Research funds come from the Natural Environment Research Council, the European Union and the The Royal Society.

Research collaboration is with colleagues at:

• Department of Limnology, University of Uppsala, Sweden
• Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
• Department of Ecology and Evolution, SUNY, USA
• School of Ocean Sciences, University of Wales Bangor
• Department of Biology, University of Madeira, Portugal

A current PhD student is Joshua Filer, who is based at the Marine Biological Association, Plymouth and is supervised there by Dr David Sims. Josh is working on foraging behaviour of dogfish both in the lab and in the wild.