SEB Conference 2016

Last week biologists from all over the globe descended upon Brighton in the UK for the annual meeting of the Society for Experimental Biology. As always the conference was jammed with incredible talks and was a great chance to catch up with old friends.

Our Institute at the University of Glasgow was particularly well-represented with a contingent of 14 staff and students in attendance. This included several talks and posters from the Killen lab and collaborators as well as a highly successful session organised by Shaun Killen and Stefano Marras on The Role of Individual Variation in the Behaviour of Animal Groups. We're already looking forward to next year in Gothenberg, Sweden! 

Master's student Brooke Allan presents her poster on social interactions and metabolic traits in minnows.

Ph.D. student Julie Nati is caught mid-blink as she presents here poster on how invasive bullheads and native stone loaches may differ in their hypoxia tolerance.

M.Res. student Ben Cooper giving a presentation on his work looking at how shoaling tendencies in sticklebacks may cause them to experience deviations from their individual temperatures preferences.

Killen lab collaborator and visiting Ph.D. student Matt Guzzo (University of Manitoba, Canada) presents his work looking at how brief but repeated foraging forays into warm temperatures may affect the growth and metabolism of lake trout.

Ph.D. student Tiffany Armstrong (co-supervised with Kevin Parsons) presents her work on how variation in maternal egg brooding quality may affect the social behaviour of offspring.

Killen lab collaborator and Ph.D. student Lauren Nadler (James Cooke University, Australia) giving a talk on her work looking at how exposure to shoal-mates can reduce metabolic rates in tropical damselfish. Congrats also to Lauren for winning this year's Young Scientist Award!!

Shaun Killen talks about his recent work in Brazil with Andrew Esbaugh, Tadeu Rantin, and David McKenzie on social air-breathing in African sharptooth catfish.

Glasgow research fellow Antoine Stier, Shaun Killen, and Matt Guzzo get serious to represent for Conservation Physiology. 

Upcoming Symposium - The Ecology of Exercise: Mechanisms Underlying Individual Variation in Movement Behavior, Activity or Performance

Photo of fish swimming with an external isopod parasite, courtesy of Sandra Binning.

I am proud to announce that Tony Williams (Simon Fraser University, Canada), Ryan Calsbeek (Dartmouth College, USA) and myself are organizing a symposium at the upcoming annual meeting for Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in New Orleans, USA (January 4-8, 2017), entitled The Ecology of Exercise: Mechanisms Underlying Individual Variation in Movement Behavior, Activity or Performance. Confirmed speakers are listed below, but we are also inviting other interested speakers to submit abstracts (register and submit on the SICB website here, deadline for abstracts is September 1, 2016 ).

How hard do free-living animals work? What determines how hard individuals will work on specific activities? Is "exercise" a useful paradigm to apply to animal movement? Can animals work too hard, such that they pay costs of high levels of activity? Until recently, much work on "exercise" has been based in the laboratory (e.g. wheel- or treadmill-running in mammals and reptiles, birds flying in wind tunnels) and has been divorced from ecological context. To what extent do these systems provide good models for understanding activity in free-living animals (during routine behaviour such as foraging) and in particular do they help us understand the physiology of exercise in free-living animals. In this symposium we will define movement and exercise broadly as any behaviour that elevates the level of intensity of activity, in response to an ecological demand for increased performance. This can include situations which are widely assumed to be "demanding" such as long-distance migration or foraging behaviour associated with parental care. However, we will also consider other activities like escaping predators (or mates), pursuing prey and engaging in energetic mating displays.

This symposium is especially timely given the rapid pace of recent technological advances (geolocators, GPS, accelerometers) which are giving biologists an unprecedented ability to track the behaviour of free-living animals 24/7. This will allow researchers to directly address questions of individual variation, mechanisms, and fitness consequences of variation in movement. To date much of this work has been behavioural in nature: describing individual variation in movement patterns, and relating this to outcomes such as evading a predator. Much less work has addressed the physiological mechanisms underlying individual variation in performance, although this topic is the subject of quite heated, but largely theoretical debate. By highlighting "mechanisms" in this SICB symposium we hope to foster collaborations whereby physiologists and endocrinologists can work with ecologists, to fully exploit the potential of new bio-tracking and bio-logging technology

The speakers in this symposium will cover a wide range of animal taxa, different types of activity, behaviour or performance, and both laboratory- and field-based studies. However, we will encourage all speakers to address four central questions:

1. How hard do free-living animals work during movement associated with any behaviour that elevates the level of intensity of activity, in response to an ecological (or evolutionary) demand for higher performance?

2. Can paradigms of "exercise" and "training" be applied to free-living animals and are these useful concepts to apply to animal movement?

3. Can animals work too hard during "routine" activities (e.g. rearing offspring, catching prey), such that they pay costs of high levels of activity?

4. To what extent do laboratory-based studies of activity and exercise (e.g. wheel- or treadmill-running in mammals and reptiles, birds flying in wind tunnels) provide good models for understanding activity in free-living animals?

Confirmed speakers include:

BINNING, S.*, SHAW, A., ROCHEL, D.G. Exercising when sick: the role of pathogens on animal activity.
CALSBEEK, R.* Metamorphosis as a complex resolution to ontogenetic conflict.
COOKE, S.*, BROWNSCOMBE, J., ALGERA, D. BURNETT, N, DANYLCHUK, A., HINCH, S. and FARRELL, A. The ecology of exercise in wild fish – integrating concepts of individual physiological capacity, behaviour and fitness.
GARLAND, T.* and ALBUQUERQUE, R. Locomotion, energetics, performance, and behavior: a mammalian perspective on lizards, and vice versa.
GUGLIELMO, G.* The challenge of integrating wind tunnel and field studies to understand variation in endurance flight performance of birds.
HALSEY, L.* ‘Fit for purpose’ and ‘in the best of shape’: exploring how physical fitness and body morphology might impact movement ecology.
HAWKES, L.A.*, Batbayar, N., Butler, P.J., Chua, B., Frappell, P.B., Milsom, W.K., Natsagdorj, T., Newman, S.H., Scott, GR., Spivey, R.J., Takekawa, J.Y., Wikelski, M. and Bishop, C.M. Do bar-headed geese train for high altitude flights?
MCCLELLAND, G.* Exercise fuel use in mammals: conserved patterns and evolved strategies for aerobic locomotion.
TOBALSKE, B.*, DIAL, K., and HEERS, A. Ontogeny of locomotor development in birds.
THOMSON, M.*, KNIGHT-MALONEY, M. Physiological and biomechanical mechanisms of distance specific human running performance
YAP, J.*, SEROTA, M. and WILLIAMS, T.D. The physiology of exercise in free-living animals: what can we learn from current model systems?

Wasseem's First Year Seminar

Last week first year PhD student Wasseem Emam gave a great seminar on his upcoming work looking at the effects of individual physiology on recovery from discard practices in commercial fisheries. Well done Wasseem!

Visit to University of Bristol

Earlier this week Shaun Killen visited the University of Bristol to give a departmental seminar. It was a great chance to catch up with some great colleagues and meet some fantastic people. Huge thank you to Andy Radford for being such a fabulous host and especially for the burgers!

Post-Doc Vacancy

As part of a recent NERC Highlights grant award, Kevin Parsons, Neil Metcalfe, Jan Lindstrom, and Shaun Killen are currently seeking to hire a post-doc. The project is entitled, “The predictability and limits of evolution in response to increased temperature: insights from a natural 'experiment'”, and aims to examine the genetic, epigenetic, morphological, developmental and physiological changes that occur in response to warming environments, using freshwater populations of stickleback fish from varying geothermal habitats in Iceland as a study system. The ideal candidate will have conceptual and practical knowledge in evolutionary biology, physiological ecology and/or developmental biology.

Deadline for applications is May 22, 2016. For more info, and to apply, check out this link and search for reference 013068:

http://www.gla.ac.uk/about/jobs/vacancies/

Young Fish Breathe Easier Around Top Predators

In many ecosystems, trophic cascades exist whereby top predators can have a top-down influence on the behaviour and physiology or animals at all other levels within the food web. As a prime example, top predators can eat or suppress the behaviour of medium-sized predatos ('mesopredators') such that the mesopredators have a harder time hunting for and consuming their own prey. This decrease in foraging by the mesopredators can have a beneficial effect on the abundances of prey populations.

It might also be possible that the decreased hunting behaviour of the mesopredators may reduce the stress levels of the bottom prey, with beneficial sublethal effects. Shaun Killen recently examined this possibility with colleagues Maria Palacios, Lauren Nadler, James White, and Mark McCormick using a trophic cascade found on the Great Barrier Reef: coral trout (a top predator in this case) consume dottybacks (the mesopredator) which in turn predate baby damselfish.

In lab experiments, the team measured the oxygen consumption of baby damselfish visually exposed to differing combinations of meso- and top predators and found that the presence of a top predator can reduce the measured stress response in the young fish by up to a third:

The behavioural suppression of the mesopredator in this system could have important consequences for the young damselfish. Animals have finite energy budgets, so by reducing the energy invested in antipredator responses, baby fish should be able to invest more energy in growth and storage. Anything that allows young fish to grow faster and get a good start on life could be beneficial for increasing adult populations. These results highlight the important role that top predators play in regulating ecosystems. Read more here!:

Palacios, M., Killen, S.S., Nadler, L., White, J.R., McCormick, M.I. 2016. Top-predators negate the effect of mesopredators on prey physiology. Journal of Animal Ecology. DOI: 10.1111/1365-2656.12523

Davide's First Year Seminar

Yesterday PhD student Davide Thambithurai gave his first year seminar to our research institute. It was a fantastic talk, summarising his ongoing and proposed work using zebrafish as a means to study fisheries-induce evolution. He also got a lot of great feedback and questions. Great work Davide!

Nordic Adventures

Over the past couple weeks I've been fortunate enough to travel to some pretty exciting places and meet lots of great people. First up was a trip to Turku, Finland, to be an external examiner and keynote speaker at the AURA PhD Student Symposium. It was a really incredible experience and I was extremely impressed with the quality and breadth of the research projects presented by students from the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi .

Photo courtesy of Kjartan Mæstad/IMR 

After a short break in Helsinki I was then off to Bergen, Norway, where I was grateful to have been invited to attend the kick-off meeting for the ConEvolHer project at the Institute of Marine Research. The meeting was coordinated by project leader Katja Enberg and included her fantastic students and collaborators. It was fascinating to hear all about their upcoming work and to tell the folks in attendance about our own work on fisheries-induced evolution as part of the ERC PHYSFISH project. Later in the week I also gave a talk at the University of Bergen. The trip also included a lot of great (but expensive!) beer and my first ever Finnish sauna experience, courtesy of Christian Jørgensen. Looking forward to returning!

Welcome to Matt Guzzo!

A big welcome from our lab to Matt Guzzo, a visiting PhD student from the University of Manitoba in Canada. He'll be visiting for 3 months as part of a NSERC Foreign Study Supplement. Matt studies the effects of environmental factors such as temperature on the movements of freshwater fishes, specialising in acoustic telemetry. While in Glasgow he'll be working with Shaun Killen and Neil Metcalfe on a range of lab experiments to examine the effects of thermal regimes on social hierarchies and digestive physiology in brown trout. He'll also be getting involved in some ongoing telemetry work. And making many trips to the pub. Welcome Matt!

Ecology, Morphology, and Metabolic Rates Across Fish Species

Fish may be the most diverse vertebrate group, with incredibly athletic species like the tunas as well as more sedentary species such as sculpins and flatfish. Why does this variation exist? Why don’t all species simply evolve to be ever bigger, stronger, and faster? Are there advantages to being more sluggish?

Shaun Killen and colleagues examined this issue across 131 fish species and found that maximum metabolic rate—a trait which is related to swimming ability and athleticism—shows a 40-fold range across species. Species with more active lifestyles or that have higher positions within food-webs—pelagic predators, for example—tend to have higher maximum metabolic rates.

Importantly, maximum metabolic rate is closely related to the minimum metabolic rate that a species needs to sustain life. In other words, species that are built for a higher peak performance also spend more energy when they are at rest. An analogy is a high-performance car that requires more fuel than a slower car, even while both are idling.

This is likely a key limitation preventing the evolution of ever higher capacities for aerobic metabolism and swimming ability. A higher minimum metabolic rate will cause a species to require more food and oxygen—resources that are often in short supply in aquatic environments.

Read more in the ahead of print link here: 
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/685893

Citation: Killen, S.S., Glazier, D.G., Rezende, E.L., Clark, T.D., Atkinson, D., Willener, A., Halsey, L.G. 2016. Ecological influences and morphological correlates of resting and maximal metabolic rates across teleost fish species. American Naturalist. DOI: 10.1086/685893

Brazil Trip 2016

Shaun Killen recently returned from a 3-week trip to Brazil to work with friends and colleagues David McKenzie, Andrew Esbaugh, and Tadeu Rantin. The main aim was to study how metabolic rate and social interactions affect surfacing behaviour in air-breathing catfish. An important side mission was to have fun and sample the local caipirinhas. 

The arena used to study air-breathing behaviour in groups of catfish. The tank was originally blue, but we needed it to be white for the filming. Urine-proof bed sheets to the rescue!

All fish were beaded for identification while in the behavioural arena.

Andrew demonstrates his sewing technique.

We used bimodal respirometry to measure the amount of oxygen the fish breath from the water and from the air.

David setting up the respirometers.

Caipirinha time!

Guest Speaker: Beatriz Diaz Pauli

This week we've been happy to host special guest Dr Beatriz Diaz Pauli (University of Bergen) to our lab and Institute. Beatriz gave a fantastic departmental lecture describing her work on guppies, where she's been using simulated fisheries harvesting over generations of selection to provide insight into the phenomenon of fisheries induced evolution.

How do metabolic rate and food-deprivation affect sociability in fish?

Many animal species spend at least part of their time living in groups. Many fish live in shoals, birds in flocks, mammals in herds, just to name a few. With many eyes searching, group membership can allow animals to consistently find food. A potential downside to being in a group, however, is that some group members can take more than their fair share of found food. Think about the last time you ordered too small a pizza for too many people. Animals must weigh these benefits and costs when determining how closely they will associate with members of their own species.

A number of factors might affect an animal’s level of sociability. Previous studies in fish have shown that a few days of fasting can cause individuals to stray from groups to decrease competition for food. In the same way, individuals with a higher metabolic rate could be less social to maximise food intake to satisfy their heightened energy demand. Unknown is how prolonged food-deprivation affects sociability. It is very common for wild fishes to experience weeks of food-deprivation during seasonal changes in food availability. The effects of longer-term food deprivation on sociability could differ drastically from the effects of shorter-term hunger.

We examined these issues in a recently published study conducted in China, along with my great colleagues Shi-Jian Fu and Yuxiang Wang, and two fantastic students, Cheng Fu and Qingyi Wu. We performed the study with young qingbo carp, which are one of the most common fish living in the Yangtze river system. Notably, this species is highly gregarious and also spends several weeks during the winter under complete food deprivation. 

In the laboratory, individuals were either food-deprived for 21 days (to simulate a bout of seasonal food-deprivation), or fed a maintenance ration. Fish from each diet treatment were measured for metabolic rate and tested for sociability twice: once in the presence of a well-fed control shoal of fish and once with a food-deprived shoal.

Over the course of a 30 minute trial, fish that had been on a maintenance ration ventured further away from shoals, while food-deprived fish remained close to the shoal. This is unlike fish that have been fasted for a few days, which tend to decrease association with shoals. Prolonged food-deprivation may cause individuals to put such a high priority on food-acquisition that they need to remain with their group to help alert them to predators while they continuously forage.

Among well-fed fish, those with a higher metabolic rate were least sociable, especially when exposed to food-deprived shoals. This probably minimises competition, allowing them to satisfy an increased energetic demand while foraging. Overall, these results suggest that energy demand and food-deprivation – a challenge common for many ectothermic species – can affect individual sociability as well as the attractiveness of groups to members of their species. 

You can read more about this work here:

Killen, S.S., Fu, C., Wu, Q., Wang, Y.-W., and Fu, S-J. 2016. The relationship between metabolic rate and sociability is altered by food-deprivation. Functional Ecology. doi: 10.1111/1365-2435.12634

Visit to University of Exeter, Penryn

This week Shaun Killen visited the the lovely Penryn Campus of the University of Exeter to give a seminar on how metabolism is linked to social behaviours in animals. It was a fantastic few days with a lot of great discussions (and pints). Special thanks to Dr Lucy Hawkes for the invite down and for being such a great host!

Guest Speaker: James White

This week we were lucky enough to have James White visit our lab and give a seminar to our department. James is a recent graduate from James Cook University in Australia. His PhD work  was one of the first attempts to examine animal personality traits in wild fishes in a natural setting, focussing on young damselfishes. While he was part of Mark McCormick's research group, James collaborated on several projects with Shaun Killen at the Lizard Island Research Station on the Great Barrier Reef.

MiniTrawl v2.0

This week we've been very happy to test-run the second version of our MiniTrawl for performing small scale simulations of trawl fishing procedures. It's shown in the image above, being flown in a swim flume and with minnows for scale! Huge thank you to the workshop at the Marine Institute at the Memorial University of Newfoundland for the trawl design and construction. It certainly constitutes an improvement over our latest version, which was made from tights! (though still worked like a charm):

Graduation Day!

Today we were very proud to see Chris Convery and Alyson Casey graduate with their MSci degrees after completing their programmes with our lab group last year. Both of them carried out fantastic research and were great to have as part of the team. Congrats Chris and Alyson! 

Lizard Island Trip 2015

Shaun Killen is just back from a short-but-sweet visit to Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef, as part of an ongoing series of collaborations with Mark McCormick and Lauren Nadler at James Cook University in Australia. See a short video compilation of some of their work, here!:

Guest Speaker: Lucy Hawkes

This week our lab hosted Dr Lucy Hawkes from the University of Exeter. Lucy gave a fantastic seminar to our department summarising her amazing work on bar headed geese and their migrations over the Himalayas.

Upcoming Conference Session: The Role of Individual Variation in the Behaviour of Animal Groups

I am very excited to announce that Stefano Marras (IMC, Italy) and myself are organising a session for the next Society for Experimental Biology conference (04 - 07 July 2016, Brighton, UK) entitled, "The Role of Individual Variation in the Behaviour of Animal Groups". I think this will be an incredibly interesting symposium as there is exciting work on social behaviours being performed in almost every animal taxa. We welcome any submissions for talks or posters that consider how individual variation in either behaviour or physiology interacts with the functioning of animal groups. This can include fish schools, bird flocks, insect swarms or nests, mammalian huddling - anything. We particularly welcome submission from students and early career researchers. Submit your abstract here!

So far our confirmed invited speakers include:

• Ashley Ward (University of Sydney) "From Individuals to Groups: How Behaviour and Physiology Shape Collective Behaviour"
• Susanne Shultz (University of Manchester ) "Population variation in mountain zebra social networks: individuals, demography and ecology impact on structure"
• Steve Portugal (Royal Holloway University of London) “The good, the bad, and the ugly: Who is really benefiting from moving in groups?”
• Audrey Dussutour (CNRS, Université Paul Sabatier) "Ant nutrition: from individual needs to collective decision"
• Andrew King (University of Swansea) “Heterogeneity in animal collectives”

Here is the symposium blurb:

"Individuals within species show tremendous variation in physiological and behavioural traits. Over the last decade there has been a surge of interest in the ecological and evolutionary importance of this diversity, but the vast majority of this work has been performed on isolated animals. In reality, however, most animals - from insects to mammals - do not live in a vacuum, but instead live within complex social structures. Social influences may override links between traits that exist in solitary animals. Conversely, an individual's standing within a group may be an important factor generating intraspecific variation. Overall, relationships between individual variation and group behaviours will have an important influence on social hierarchies, group migrations, the spatial distribution of phenotypes, and evolutionary trajectories. In particular, the role of individual physiological traits associated with energy metabolism, endocrine status, and sensory physiology are only beginning to be recognised. Without a full understanding of the genetic and mechanistic underpinnings of group behaviours, we cannot possibly predict how animal groups will respond to aspects of environmental change. The recent research focus on intraspecific variability has revealed important insights into physiological and behavioural ecology, but current work is now extending the paradigm to include the physiology and behaviour of animal groups. This session will bring together researchers in this emerging field to exchange ideas and present work at the frontier of our understanding of the role that individual variation plays in the collective animal behaviour."