• Question: Do you study all fish or just crayfish if you do what is your favourite type of fish to study?

    Asked by dior101 to Zara on 13 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by orangelover98.
    • Photo: Zara Gladman

      Zara Gladman answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      I mostly just study crayfish – however, some of my experiments have looked at how crayfish interact with other animals, like the freshwater pearl mussel. The freshwater pearl mussel is a really rare and endangered species and we’re worried that crayfish will eat or disturb mussels if they spread to their habitat. The pearl mussel has an amazing life cycle, so just ask me if you want to learn more! I’ve also done a little bit of work on salmon, a very important fish in Scotland – salmon help generate millions of pounds every year for the economy, because people like to fish for them. I’ve done experiments to see if crayfish eat the eggs of salmon. Finally, I’d really like to do more experiments to see if crayfish impact another important fish, the lamprey. Lamprey are amazing, ancient fish – scientists call them ‘living fossils’ because they haven’t changed much in the past 300+ million years! They would be very interesting fish to study.

      Other than that, my work is pretty much on crayfish! 🙂 If i could choose to study ANY fish species ever, though, then I’d go for the mudskipper – an amazing fish that can live out of water! They’re really funny-looking as well, check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KurTiX4FDuQ

      I’d also LOVE to work on sharks… one of my friends studied them in Bimini in the Bahamas a few years ago and she had an amazing time.

Comments

  • Photo: Edd

    Edd commented on :

    @ Zara – in your crayfish studies have you come across Nephrops? They both seem to be burrowing crustaceans except Nephrops live in the sea. I have a student doing a PhD on Nephrops ecology around Ireland at the moment and I am wondering how much similarity there may be…
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephrops_norvegicus

  • Photo: Zara

    Zara commented on :

    @ Edd yes I have! one of my friends (Nick Beevers) recently finished his PhD on a parasite (Hematodinium spp.) that infects Nephrops and there’s another student in my year, Andy Watts, who’s studying their trophic dynamics. If you think it would be useful, I could pass on their email addresses to your student! As for crayfish, there’s definitely a bit of overlap, I think they have quite similar life cycles – moulting, females carrying eggs overwinter etc.

    • Photo: Edd

      Edd commented on :

      Aah good stuff! A bit of googling led me to their webpages – Andy Watts must know Dave Smith from here at Essex (from going on Operation Wallacea). One of my other PhD students is about to go to Indonesia for 2 months to study reef fish behaviour.

      Nephrops are interesting as they are essentially sedentary – they do move around but not very far and hence they are found in colonies on the mudbanks that they live in. An interesting question we are investigating is the connectivity of these different colonies. I guess crayfish are more mobile? But they still must have a similar problem in that their population connectivity is limited by the geography of the river and lake system…?

      I am starting to feel these comments are getting very technical….! 🙂

  • Photo: Zara

    Zara commented on :

    Crayfish are definitely very mobile! I did a bit of radio-tracking in the River Clyde and found that they can move quite big distances in a relatively short period of time (maybe 200m in a couple days). They tend to move quite far, then stay in one position for a while… then move a big distance again… and so on. I also found from the mark-recapture stuff I did in Loch Ken that they’re very mobile in lakes – a few of them moved about a quarter of a mile in two weeks. They can also move on land, although I’m not sure how far they’d get. River features like waterfalls can limit their movements upstream but won’t stop them completely as they’re pretty good climbers!