Methods in Marine Biology and Ecology: Studying the Effects of Ocean Change

TOPICAL COLLECTIONS

Guest Editors

Cécile Dang

Government of Western Australia, Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD)

Cécile Dang is a Principal Research Scientist in the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development and leader of the Fish Health Laboratory. Prior to this appointment, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Aquatic Animal Health Laboratory at The University of Queensland. The focus of her research has been to better understand the interactions between the host, the pathogen, and the environment, especially the ones that are of significant importance for the industry. She also investigated the impact of various stressors on the susceptibility of the host to pathogens. During her research career, she has studied and worked across a wide range of disciplines in aquatic animal health including molecular biology, pathology, virology, bacteriology, next-generation sequencing, flow-cytometry, focusing principally on mollusks (abalone, pearl oysters, clams, oysters). She investigated diseases and syndromes affecting mollusks in France and Australia such as QX disease in the rock oyster Saccostrea glomerata, bonamiosis in flat oysters Ostrea angasi, POMS in Pacific oysters Crassostrea gigas and pearl oysters Pinctada margaritifera, perkinsosis in various mollusk species, brown muscle diseases in the clam Ruditapes philippinarum, as well as bacterial diseases and helminthosis in various mollusk species. Her work has involved field surveys but also experimental challenges in controlled laboratory conditions. Since the beginning of her career, she has been involved in 21 national and international projects and was the principal investigator in 8 of them. She has published to date 28 peer-reviewed papers in high-ranking journals.

Eliot Hanrio

University of Western Australia

Eliot is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at The University of Western Australia, and his research aims at investigating and characterising the microbiome associated with rocks in the arid area of Murujuga, in which aboriginal petroglyphs as old as 50,000 years old are carved. Eliot began his studies at the University of Bordeaux, France, where he studied Medicine, before quickly diverting towards a successful Bachelor’s degree specialising in the biology of organisms and ecosystems. Having had the opportunity to study in Australia during that degree, he went on to complete his Master’s degree in Marine Science at Southern Cross University in NSW, Australia, with a research component investigating the effects of ocean change on different parameters of a species of sea urchin. Eliot then fulfilled a PhD at The University of Western Australia in immunology, marine and molecular biology, during which he developed antibodies to elaborate a quick and efficient new immunology based diagnostic test for the protozoan parasite Perkinsus olseni of green-lip abalone. Through his research, he developed skills in molecular biology, cell biology, immunology, marine biology and ecology, microbiology, as well as experimental design.

Collection Overview

The purpose of this collection would be to collect methods relevant to experiments in marine biology and ecology, especially related to the influence of ocean warming and acidification on organisms or group of organisms. As climate and ocean change are harbouring more drastic effects to ecosystems, studies of their impact at different taxonomic levels are getting more frequent and more significant. Such studies might have impacts reaching up to governmental policy changes, stakeholder decision making shifts, and lead to important changes.

While laboratory experiments can be well documented and replicated, some studies on impacts of ocean change on marine life can be challenging to replicate when they are done in the field. JoVE would find that documenting lab experiments in this field would resemble current other collections, whilst documenting “in field” studies would be a new domain that have an interesting potential. As per current knowledge, no scientific journal is documenting such experiments.

An example of a laboratory experiment is presented by Dworjanyn & Byrne (2018). They ran a state-of-the-art study with three different temperatures and CO₂ concentrations on sea urchins Tripneustes gratilla, resulting in nine treatments, to investigate the survival and growth rate of these organisms under different climate change scenarios of the IPCC.

The collection could thus focus on studies regarding survival, calcification and growth rates of organisms directly impacted by ocean changes, such as hard corals, calcifying organisms, fish and seagrass.