Profile

I research how the carbon dioxide produced by humans can affect marine life.

Humans produce carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels. We all burn fossil fuels every day! For example, we burn fossil fuels when we get in our cars and travel to school/work, when we put the heating on at night-time, and when we charge our mobile phones.

The carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels goes into the atmosphere. Some of this carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere and acts like a blanket for the earth, causing it to warm up. When the earth warms up like this, we call it global warming. It is not just the earth that heats up, our oceans warm up too and we call this ocean warming. This can cause ice caps to melt and sea levels to rise.

Not all of the carbon dioxide produced by humans stays in the atmosphere;some of it also gets absorbed by the oceans. When carbon dioxide gets absorbed into the ocean it reacts with the seawater and makes it more acidic, we call this ocean acidification. Both ocean acidification and ocean warming are climate change effects on our oceans. These effects are getting worse, as we are all burning more and more fossil fuels each day.

My role is to explore how ocean acidification and ocean warming are affecting our marine species and our marine food webs.

This is important because we (humans) depend on a healthy marine food web for our food, such as ourfish and chips! In the UK we eat lots of meat, as well as fish, so we can get our protein from the land (e.g., chickens, cows and sheep) as well as the sea (e.g., fish and chips, fish cakes, fish fingers).  BUT in some countries, people rely 100% on fish for their protein intake! So it is important to understand how ocean warming and ocean acidification will effect our marine food webs, and how this will impact on humans.

A VERY important group of marine species in the marine food web are the “zooplankton”. This group is so important because they are a link between the base of the food chain, the algae, to the higher levels of the food chain, the fish. In other words, the zooplankton eat the algae, and the fish then eat the zooplankton.

algae ——> eaten by zooplankton ——-> eaten by fish

Without the zooplankton, the fish would not be able to live (and we would have no fish and chips!).

As a scientist my role is to understand how ocean warming and ocean acidification will effect zooplankton,  fish populations, and humans.

I look at this by going out to sea by boat and collecting samples of zooplankton . We take the zooplankton back to the laboratory and then count all the individuals. We have to do this by looking down a microscope, as most of them are too SMALL to see by eye!

We run experiments with the zooplankton we have caught from the sea. We see how they behave to different levels of ocean warming and ocean acidification.

After the experiment, we estimate how the behaviour of the zooplankton to ocean warming and ocean acidification could affect fish populations and humans.

My daily routine varies from day-to-day. That is one of the best parts of the job, no day is ever the same and each day brings you something new and exciting!

Boat

If I am out on the boat we would leave quite early so we could get the most of the tides. This job does not have the same hours as you are used to in school. We could leave on the boats at 6am and not get back till 7pm that evening. Each day has a different time-table  and is another part of the job that makes it quite exciting.

When we are on the boats, we will travel to our work station out at sea. Here we will collect the zooplankton samples using a plankton net. These nets are thrown over board and towed behind the boat.  These nets are special because they capture thousands of zooplankton from the sea and concentrate them down into a single cup! The zooplankton are then washed into a big bucket on-board the boat, filled with water and taken back to the laboratory.

At the lab, we identify the number of species we have caught in our sample and then count all the individuals. We do this by using a microscope, as most of the zooplankton are too small to see by eye. When we do look down the microscope there can be thousands of different zooplankton that all look very different, have a look at this link which shows the different type of zooplankton we can see in a drop of seawater down the microscope.

Experiment 

If I am running an experiment I will be in lots of different types of laboratories during the day.

One of the lab rooms is called the algae room, and looks a bit like something off of Dr. Who! This is where we grow the algae to be able to feed our zooplankton. This is called large-scale culturing (and you can see why its called large!). Just 1mL of algae from those big tubes has more than 1 million cells of algae in it. Each algae cell is very small – they are 1000 times smaller than a pin head!

The RAS,  is another lab where we run large scale experiments on our zooplankton and fish in these large 600L tanks. Each one of these tanks could fill your bath at home around 6 times! Running experiments of this size is very hard work, and can often mean coming back during the night time to take a sample or check that the animals within the tanks are OK.

When we run experiments, we use lots of different types of equipment and will often be going from room to room throughout the day. Two examples of equipment I use are described below.

Coulter counter: this machine measures how many cells of algae there are in your big bags of algae (remember the Dr. Who photo!)
Flow cam: this machine measures the size of each of your zooplankton individuals

Desk 

When I have a day off from the labs and boat work, I will spend time on my computer writing up the results from my experiments and analysing the data. This is a BIG part of being a scientist. You have a responsibility to write up your results and share them with other colleagues, members of the public and sometimes with the government.