Profile

I am a marine biologist investigating food webs (who eats who!)  in marine environments all around the UK. ***To find out what animal in the sea shore you would be, take the quiz click here***

I am trying to understand how food webs change in different locations and times a year.

A food web! – everyone needs to eat something, and I am trying to find out who eats whom!

The areas I am working in – mud flats and sandy areas – can be quite challenging, check out my work mate Justin trying to remove a pole we stick our nets on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Qoi1wrDU3g

To understand the food webs I have been sampling all over the place, inluding Essex mud flats, Morecambe Bay, huge expanses of white sand, dangerous tides and quick sand.

Field work is dangerous!I also work in Lough Foyle, Carlingford Lough and Belfast, where we caught some amazing species, including the critically engendered European eel!

Lough Foyle, Carlingford lough and Belfast, where we found some amazing species, including the critically endangered European eel:

A European eel caught in Lough Foyle

At the moment I am sampling Lough Carlingford every two months, because I want to understand how the food webs change at different times in the year. I am asking questions like: Are there less animals in winter (I think so!), What are herbivores feeding on in winter when there is no algae (I am not sure!), and when do most animals breed (In late summer I think.).

To understand food webs I need to know which animals live in the mud and the water above I need to catch them. To do that I use nets that I leave out at low tide and then collect after the high tide. To understand what lives in the mud I collect sediment and identify the animals I find in them.

A fyke net I am using to catch animals at high tide

Sometimes I also get to help out with other research projects, some of them in amazing locations like Egypt, Ecuador and Bolivia. Here is a picture of me in a coral reef in Egypt.

Can you spot the eel I am next to?

When I am doing fieldwork…

These can be very long days, but its lovely to be out at the seashore when the sun is shining. Sometimes things get quite muddy….

6am: Getting up early and driving to the sampling site. I usually have people helping me out with the fieldwork, because it can be quite exhausting.

8am: Arrive at the site and meet our research partners from the Loughs Agency. These guys are helping us with the sampling. Sometimes we get to drive the Polaris, which is an awesome caterpillar vehicle!

Measuring algae in sediment is so much more fun when you have the Polaris to drive around!

8am – 3pm: Fieldwork: Putting nets out on the mudflat or collecting nets, collecting and sieving mud, getting stuck in mud. We use sledges to transport our materials between the sites.

We use Arctic sledges to lug our equipment around the mud!

3-5pm: Drive back home to Belfast.

5-7pm: Having a very big dinner with my field assistants, we deserve it!

In the lab…

I am sharing a lab with other researchers, but have my own little corner where I have all my stuff.

Its always a little chaotic there. 

Here a video of my lab:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0X5IYtzMKM&feature=youtu.be

After coming back from fieldwork there is always a lot work to do! Often I spend days trying to identify tiny worms in the sediment, which can be really difficult. I also have to measure animals caught in the nets (fish and crabs) to find out how big they are and dissect them to check their stomachs to find out what they have been eating. That’s always a little bit smelly and my colleagues avoid the lab when I do that.

In the office…

Whenever I am in the office I work at the computer a lot: typing in results, writing up my work, reading scientific papers and drinking a lot of coffee.

There are about nine other researchers in my office, which is nice (sometimes distracting), because there is always someone to chat with.

I love the view I have from my office: I can see all of Belfast!