Profile

Like most marine biologists I love the sea and anything outdoors. You can usually find me at the weekends at the beach rockpooling or out hiking on Dartmoor. Most people wouldn’t know it but the UK has some amazing snorkelling spots which I try and see as much as I can. I also love surfing and skiing whenever possible.

When the weathers not so nice I love staying in and watching/reading anything sci-fi or fantasy. I also love travelling so when I can I like to escape the bad weather and have been lucky enough to go all over the world from Australia, to Texas and even Vietnam!

My pronouns are he/him.

I’m a PhD student living and working in Exeter in the South West of the England. I’ve lived here for nearly 8 years now! I’m currently working towards my PhD in sustainable aquaculture. To do this I spend a lot of time doing what I’m doing in the picture below, hoovering up fish poo!

My research is all about how the water chemistry we find in fish farm affects a fishes biology. It can affect things like their sense of smell, how hungry they get, how fast they grow and even whether they get ill or not! I work on figuring out what water conditions would be best for fish to be grown in, in order for our fish farms to be as efficient as possible!

As I’ve mentioned previously, I love to travel and see the world and luckily my PhD has allowed me to go all over the world! So far I’ve been up to the mountains of Scotland,  the coastline of Texas  (yes, it has a coastline!), to the rivers of Vietnam, and even presented my research at a conference in Seville (below).

Every year I’m also lucky enough also teach on a coral reef ecology course for my university  in the Bahamas. This is my favourite time of the year as I get to show people my favourite place in the world and talk about the complex relationships and amazing biology that exists on the reef!

Every morning I have to go and say hello to my lovely rainbow trout in the aquarium. I look at them to make sure they haven’t got any injuries, or gotten sick. Once I know they’re all happy I then weigh out a certain amount of food for each fish and drop it into their tanks. I’ll leave them to eat for a bit while I take some water samples and then any food they don’t eat I take out to make sure it doesn’t go mouldy in the tanks. I’ll measure the water samples to check the conditions. Usually I look at how salty the water is (when they’re this small they like to be in freshwater), what the temperature of the water is, how acid or alkali the water is (and change it if necessary) and how much carbon dioxide is in the water.

When I’m running an experiment sometimes I’ll have to take samples from the fish.  Sometimes I can measure things like how much oxygen they’re taking up without bothering the fish (i.e. by measuring the oxygen in the water instead).  Other times I have to handle the fish. I do this by carefully adding an anaesthetic to the water so they fall asleep and then taking the fish out of the water for a short period of time while I take any samples. The fish then goes back into a clean tank without any anaesthetic to wake up and is none the wiser!

Then I’ll go and analyse the samples in the lab. If the experiment is very complicated and we have a lot of variables to measure I’ll rope some of the other PhD students in my department in to help. Here’s a few of us after a marathon 10 hour day of sampling still as happy as ever!!!

Some of the things we look for are how acidic the blood is, how much carbon dioxide is in the blood, whether the fish had any lactic acid in the blood, how much sugar is in the blood and which salts are in the blood. From all of this we can work out what processes are going on inside the fish in response to its environment.