Thermal stress and parasite infection in aquatic ecosystems: Will fishes be able to cope in a warmer, wormier world?

Speaker: Dr. Sandra Binning
Associate Professor & Canada Research Chair (Eco-Evolution of Host-Parasite Interactions)
Université de Montréal
Thermal stress and parasite infection in aquatic ecosystems: Will fishes be able to cope in a warmer, wormier world?

Increases in average water temperature and the frequency of heatwaves caused by climate change affect the physiology and behaviour of aquatic ectotherms, including fishes. Warmer waters can also increase the transmission of some parasite species suggesting that aquatic organisms may have to cope with both stressors simultaneously. In this talk, Dr. Binning will discuss some of her team’s recent research on the consequences of both temperature increases and parasite infection on host fishes as well as how processes like thermal acclimation may help fishes across different life stages better cope with these concomitant stressors. She suggests that reimagining the future of oceans and fisheries requires us to think synergistically across experimental approaches and scientific disciplines with communication and collaboration as the foundation for finding innovation solutions to these pressing issues.

BIO: Sandra is originally from Montréal, Canada, where she discovered her love of fishes during her master’s degree at McGill University which explored environmental drivers of intraspecific morphological variation in the jaws and gills of East African cichlids. She completed her PhD in Canberra at the Australian National University in 2014 where she worked on morphological and physiological variation in coral reef fishes across gradients of waves and water motion. She then moved to the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland where she continued to work on the Great Barrier Reef as a post-doc studying cleaning mutualisms and the role of parasitic infections on fish behaviour and cognition. In 2018, she began her position at the University of Montreal where she is currently an Associate Professor and the Canada Research Chair in the Eco-Evolution of Host-Parasite Interactions.
Photo: “Squirming Sea Lice” by avlxyz is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.