Adaptation in the extreme: transgenerational impacts of multistressors in rockpool environments

Lead Supervisor/Director of Studies: Dr Helena Reinardy,

Supervisory Team: Prof Jason Weeks, Dr Victoria Pritchard, Prof Michelle Jackson

Application deadline: Monday, April 29, 2024

Competition Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)

This project is part of the NERC-funded Centre for Doctoral Training, ECOWILD. For more details, and for a full list of projects offered under this programme, please visit:

Postgraduate Research - Studentships (uhi.ac.uk)

https://ecowild.site.hw.ac.uk/

Intertidal supra-littoral wetland ecosystems are defined by extremely dynamic and variable environmental conditions driven by tidal, climate, and terrestrial input cycles. They are increasingly exposed to multiple human-induced stressors of global climate change and pollution. In this project, we will use the rockpool copepod Tigriopus brevicornus as a laboratory model to examine the short and long term impacts of such stressors and the ways in which extreme intertidal species might adapt under future climate change scenarios.

Tigriopus copepods are adapted to survive in high intertidal pools, which undergo extreme fluctuations in environmental conditions, principally salinity, temperature, oxygen, and pH, over tidal, semilunar (spring/neap) and seasonal cycles. Tigriopus are emerging as an ideal laboratory model to study the mechanistic basis of zooplankton response and adaptation to environmental variation and local pollutants. This project brings together expert supervisors in zooplankton ecology, behaviour, chronobiology, genetics, genomics, and applied conservation to shed light on mechanisms of stress response and long-term implications of transgenerational adaptation to multiple stressors in these extremophiles.

The student be based at the Scottish Association of Marine Science (SAMS) will train in field and analytical techniques to monitor environmental conditions and pollution status in wetland habitats. The student will then learn laboratory methods to culture copepods and assay their behaviour, physiology and reproductive fitness, and be supported to undertake and statistically analyse and multigenerational multistressor experiments. The student will additionally learn and develop laboratory, bioinformatic, and statistical approaches to examine stressor responses at the genetic level, focusing on transgenerational adaptation and comparisons across the study populations. The student will benefit in their training from the wide expertise across the supervision team.

We recognise that not every talented researcher will have had the same opportunities to advance their careers. We therefore will account for any particular circumstances that applicants disclose (e.g. parental leave, caring duties, part-time jobs to support studies, disabilities etc.) to ensure an inclusive and fair recruitment process.

We will be holding online ‘meet the supervisor’ events on March 25th, 26th and 27th – if you can’t make these but are interested in this project, please contact the lead supervisor directly. Links to the scheduled ‘meet the supervisor’ events, as well as the full list of projects advertised under this CDT, can be found here https://ecowild.site.hw.ac.uk/phd-training/

ECOWILD is committed to making science and innovation research as equitable, inclusive and diverse as possible. This means all of us – including programme leads, partner affiliates, supervisors, students and collaborators – are eager to bring our best so that you can bring yours, too!