About the project
Mesopelagic fishes are the most abundant vertebrates on Earth and play important roles sustaining food webs and in the biological carbon pump. The combined threats of future climate scenarios and interest in harvesting poorly known mesopelagic fishes raise concern about the potential effects on ecosystem services. This project will provide detailed fundamental knowledge on the functional ecology of mesopelagic fishes in the Atlantic ocean.
The primary aim of this project is to determine physiological, functional and morphological traits for a wide range of mesopelagic fish taxa, and map the distribution of these traits across the Atlantic ocean. Mesopelagic fishes are diverse taxonomically, morphologically and functionally, but our understanding of how their functional traits (and associated ecosystem services) are distributed taxonomically and spatially is very limited.
A central component of the project revolves around application of newly developed stable isotope-based proxy for field metabolic rate (Chung et al 2019, Alewijnse et al 2020). You will use this approach to estimate the metabolic rates of mesopelagic fishes from otoliths supplied from previous and ongoing international projects. Simultaneously you will draw on museum collections and literature to build a dataset of morphological characters associated with functional traits. Using phylogenetically-informed analyses, you will explore how physiological and morphological traits covary across taxa, and how these traits map onto known behavioral traits such as position in the water column, diet and vertical migration. Finally you will compile new data and draw on existing datasets of mesopelagic fish distributions to explore how environmental factors such as temperature profiles, primary production, and oxygen availability influence the suite of functional traits present and the relative biomass of species expressing specific traits.
Ultimately you will generate data that can be used to better understand complex mesopelagic communities and improve predictions of the distribution of ecosystem services provided by mesopelagic fishes.
Supervisory team
The supervisory team includes supervisors from several organisations, including our INSPIRE Partners. Please contact the Lead Supervisor for more information about the team.
Training
The INSPIRE DTP programme provides comprehensive personal and professional development training alongside extensive opportunities for students to expand their multi-disciplinary outlook through interactions with a wide network of academic, research and industrial/policy partners. The student will be registered and hosted at the University of Southampton.
Specific training will include: Mesopelagic ecology and field tools used to sample mesopelagic ecosystems, fish taxonomy, otolith dissection, reading, and sampling for stable isotope analyses, interpretation of stable isotope data, ecophysiology and metabolic ecology, morphological trait analysis, and phylogenetically informed trait analysis. At-sea specimen collecting, specimen preservations and curation, light and scanning electron microscopy, dissection, high-resolution specimen photography, data management (DELTA, DarwinCore, OBIS, WoRMS).
