Featured New Research

Professor Shoshanah Jacobs, her MSc student Joshua Cunningham, and some of their colleagues have published a study that hopes to show that the scale at which you conduct your experiment can really impact your findings.

In the study, they found a relationship between age and foraging behaviour in thick-billed murres (Uria lomvia), contradicting a previous study that had found no link.

Many wild populations undergo seasonality where they cycle between peaks of high and low numbers across several generations. 

Research from four members of the Department of Integrative Biology, Dr. Gustavo S. Betini, Dr. Andrew McAdam, Dr. Cortland Griswold, and Dr. Ryan Norris provides empirical and mathematical evidence that seasonality caused by density-dependence and evolutionary trade-offs may be driving these population cycles.

Professor Joe Ackerman was newly minted PhD when he first took note of mussels 'blowing rings' and has come back to examine this behavior in collaboration with his former MSc student, post-doctoral fellow and current professor at Williams College, Mike Nishizaki. The two scientists are now investigating how mussel feeding behavior can impact local mixing.

Earlier research had shown that zebrafish embryos could survive hypoxia (low oxygen) and even anoxia (complete absence of oxygen) during the first 24 hours which is quite a feat.

This piqued the interest of Prof. Nick Bernier and his students, Catie Ivy and Cayleigh Robertson who are now both PhD students at McMaster University under Profs. Graham Scott and Grant McClelland, respectively.

The body temperature of fish is the same as their environment. This means that a change in environmental temperatures, such as in the winter, results in a decrease in the physiological temperatures of fish. Such a change represents a significant challenge for temperate fish species, such as rainbow trout, that remain active in the winter as a decrease in temperature causes the heart to lose function.