SCHOOL OF THOUGHT

There is a common thread, or line, that brings together researchers from across the University in an interesting and quite unexpected way – fish! And there’s a reason for that. In the United Kingdom, the fisheries industry drives nearly £500 billion in profits annually, with recreational fishers in marine and freshwater systems adding a further £3 billion, providing jobs and food for millions of British people.

Given the importance of fish to the economy and society, the University of Southampton prioritised growing its knowledge in fish biology, including fisheries, water quality, infection and more. Since the start of the year, fish biology and fisheries science experts from across the University have joined forces to create a critical mass of shared expertise and experience in this area.

“Connectivity is key with regards to fish, any factor which affects the linkages in our oceans and freshwater ecosystems, can have an impact on fish, which in turn can be detrimental to people’s food sources, employment and culture,” explained Professor Paul Kemp, Director of the International Centre for Ecohydraulics

Research in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences. “From discussions and collaborations within the University, it became clear our capacity for work in this area is growing and is very comprehensive.”

In January, this year Paul worked with colleague Lauren Nadler, Lecturer in the School of Ocean and Earth Science, to host the University’s very first FishFest.

“We brought together almost 30 colleagues from not just the School of Ocean and Earth Science but also social sciences, environmental sciences and engineering, to highlight our mutual research interests and discover areas for further collaboration,” said Paul. “Many of these colleagues are new to the University and bring with them a wealth of expertise that puts Southampton firmly on the map as a leader in this area and gives us the opportunity to respond to major sustainability challenges related to life below water (SDG14) and maximise the impact of our research”.

“This group of experts has an exciting array of skills, from how we can mitigate effects of pollutants and human-made structures in waterways to future impacts like climate change, to enhance fish conservation now and into the future. We are working to pool our respective expertise and resources to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing marine and freshwater fishes in today’s world,” explained Paul.

Meet some of our fish-related experts →

PROFESSOR PAUL KEMP

Professor of Ecological Engineering

Paul’s expertise in Ecological Engineering relates to understanding the complex systems linked to integrated natural resource management, and how shocks such as infrastructure development and climate change, can influence those systems.

“Specific applications of the work I do in relation to fish, look at understanding how the behavioural ecology of fish can help solve challenges in sustainable water and energy engineering,” explained Paul. “Particularly I am interested in how the physical environment influences the behaviour and physiological performance of fish, and how manipulation of that environment by engineering means can be used to mitigate for negative impacts of water and energy resource development.”

Paul’s most recent work has been to lead an international team of scientists, to produce new recommendations to help ensure a more sustainable future for UK fisheries in the post-Brexit era.

“Despite many representatives of the UK fishing industry being disappointed with the Brexit deal on fisheries, new UK fisheries legislation provides the opportunity to dramatically improve its future sustainability,” said Paul. “We hope our advice will help policymakers achieve the objectives of the Fisheries Act which is domestic legislation that replaced the Common Fisheries Policy when the UK exited the EU.”

Paul and the team produced a balanced and comprehensive perspective on the history of UK marine fisheries policy and management, and the current status of fish stocks and the fishing industry, to provide recommendations for policy to enhance the overall sustainability of the resource.

Paul explained, “Despite some recent recovery of some stocks on which UK fishers depend, several remain in a precarious state according to the European Environment Agency.

“We provided eight recommendations that, if acted on, could enhance the viability of the industry while simultaneously protecting fish stocks that have suffered a long historic legacy of overfishing.”

Key elements of the recommendations included allowing stocks to reach high levels over and above what is needed to ensure supply, considering the effects of fishing on stocks of marine carbon as fish sequester it and the development of a diverse, low emission and modern fishing fleet. Adequately protecting Marine Protected Areas to promote the regeneration of degraded habitats and the restoration of fish stocks, and for the fishing industry and the Government to work in close partnership with the fisheries and the marine conservation science community to seek to regenerate degraded marine ecosystems, on which sustainable fisheries depend.

“To move forward in a more sustainable way, the ecological foundations on which the UK fishing industry is built are fundamental to its management,” said Paul. “Our recommendations aim to support goals for climate change, biodiversity protection and sustainable development, in collaboration with ensuring fish and their habitats thrive.”

DR LAUREN NADLER

Lecturer in the School of Ocean and Earth Science

Dr Lauren Nadler is a specialist in fish behaviour and physiology. She spends her time asking the question ‘Why do animals behave the way they do?’.

“My research spans both the animal itself, as well as the environment in which the animal lives,” she explained. “My goal is to better understand why animals behave the way that they do and what physiological traits drive these observed behaviours.

“We are still very much learning how behavioural and physiological traits are connected, and to what degree these connections drive individual variation within and among species, ecosystems, and populations.”

Before coming to Southampton, Lauren worked on the coral reefs of Egypt, Australia and Florida and spent time in both Oslo, Norway at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and San Diego, California at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

“A key element to my work abroad and here in Southampton has been around how parasites shape the behavioural and physiological traits of their hosts,” Lauren said. “What this means in fish, is that a particular parasite might find a fish host and once in that fish’s brain or elsewhere in their body may start to influence the behaviour of that fish or group of fish for its own benefit. I want to find out how parasites influence their hosts to enhance transmission to other hosts and what impact those changes have on the life of the fish, the parasite, and any other species it interacts with, such as sea birds, other underwater dwellers and so on.”

Lauren’s work as an experimental biologist frequently entails thinking outside of the box to devise new and innovative ways to measure an animal’s characteristics in as realistic a setting as possible. Over the years, this endeavour has required building a whole range of gadgets and learning new skills not typically attributed to marine science, like plumbing, electronics, and programming.

“I am working to understand how different kinds of parasites affect their fish hosts. The marine systems in Southampton are ideal for studying these kinds of questions,” she said. “Here at the university and at institutions in this area, we have access to experts in a range of fields. I am really thrilled to work in the collaborative and supportive environment at the University of Southampton and National Oceanography Centre to test these kinds of new, interdisciplinary research questions.”

DR BINDI SHAH Associate Professor in Sociology

Dr Bindi Shah is a sociologist interested in the role played by social capital – such as resources, information and networks – in overcoming disadvantage in small-scale fishing communities.

“My recent work is based in India, where I am interested in how gender, class, caste, ethnicity and religion influence access to and ability to mobilise social capital to develop resilience,” she explained. “I have been working with a small-scale fishing cooperative in Kerala, where artisanal fishing communities are vulnerable to increasing climate events, declining catches, biodiversity loss, and the lingering effects of COVID-19.”

In Indian artisanal fisheries, as in small-scale fisheries in other parts of the Global South, women play crucial roles in post-harvest processing and marketing of the fish but remain excluded from decision-making and from academic research on adaptation strategies to impacts of climate change among the fisheries. The project Bindi is working on leverages engineering and social science methodologies to create understanding and knowledge of the social and technological solutions that are needed to enhance capacity for adaptation and develop resilience to these multiple shocks or events, particularly among women.

“This project brings together interdisciplinary methodologies: social science methodologies such as statistical analysis of historical fish stock data, and qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews and participatory workshops to understand the local socio-economic, cultural and political contexts within which small-scale fisheries operate; and engineering methodologies such as the application of Internet of Things water sensors to monitor key environmental parameters that indicate ocean ecosystem health,” explained Bindi. “This data, together with publicly available satellite data will contribute to developing longer-term solutions for better management of marine ecosystems for the benefit of biodiversity and the small-scale fisheries and communities that rely on these ecosystems.”

Funded by the Royal Academy of Engineering Frontiers Programme, the project is part of the Jash-Ayurda initiative at the International Centre for Ecohydraulics Research here at Southampton and is in collaboration with Indian project partner, Central Institute of Fisheries Technology.

“Members of the community we worked with have enthusiastically participated in interviews, and workshops and have agreed to trial a mobile phone app that we are developing with additional funding from Public Policy at the University of Southampton,” said Bindi.

DR NIC BURY

Associate Professor of Natural Science, School of Ocean and Earth Sciences

Dr Nic Bury is working on an innovative approach to toxicological and disease research in fish, affectionately nicknamed ‘fish on a chip’.

The ‘fish on a chip’ approach is the creation of a bespoke platform where fish gill cells are cultivated on membrane supports, forming a barrier separating the external and internal compartments. The platform will allow for water to flow over the cells mimicking the environment of the gill in nature and allow the application of chemicals to the water to monitor uptake and effect.

“There are an estimated 350,000 chemicals on the global market with many having no data on environmental risk, or a basic understanding of their impact on organism health and tissue or cellular responses,” explained Nic. “The ethical issues with using live fish in toxicity tests, plus the cost and the enormous number of compounds to be tested, means that alternative approaches that do not use animals are required and so the ‘fish on a chip’ idea was born.”

So far, the project has identified the chemical descriptors that determine drug uptake into fish, how changes in pH influence this process, and how chemicals are metabolised in the gills.

The project is a collaboration between the University of Southampton, King’s College London and Astra Zeneca and the end goal is to help develop a strategy for acceptance of this technique for future regulatory procedures industry-wide.

A recent Natural Environment Research Council grant aims to develop a computer-based approach to predict individual species’ sensitivity to chemical pollutants. This project is focusing on how chemicals interact with the stress response of fish and more specifically how chemicals interact with the stress receptor proteins. The approach uses bioinformatic tools to predict differences in chemical docking between proteins from different fish species and then confirms our prediction using functional assays. The hope is that this can expand to other proteins and other chemicals to identify which species of fish are vulnerable to which chemicals, thus circumventing the need to perform tests with fish.

DR CLIVE TRUEMAN

Associate Professor, School of Ocean and Earth Science

We’ve all seen tags on birds’ feet and fish fins as a way of keeping a track of their location, numbers, and habits. Dr Clive Trueman’s work with fish focuses on the natural chemistry of the animal as a tracking system of its own.

“It is really important for us to understand where fish go, where they have been and what impact the environments they pass through have on them,” explained Clive. “This is so we can be aware of how numbers of fish, the health of fish and the behaviour of fish are being affected by changing ocean climates and other environmental factors.”

Using a tiny organ in a fish’s ear called the otolith, Clive can measure chemical markers which provide data on where a fish has travelled, what temperatures it has been exposed to and how high its metabolic rate has been, enabling him to establish which waters are too warm and too cold for the species to thrive.

The traceability of the fish we eat is another key element in Clive’s work. “People want to know where the food on their plate has come from, with farm-reared animals or fruit and vegetables this is easy to pinpoint, for fish it becomes somewhat more difficult because of the size of marine fisheries and the nature of fish to travel, can we definitively say where a fish has come from before it’s caught?” explained Clive.

The chemical markers Clive works with can help in that traceability. “Chemical markers mean we can match the chemical composition of fish tissues either to reference collections of fish from known catch locations or to model how the chemical markers vary across the ocean,” said Clive. “In my group, we have worked both on building reference libraries of fish chemistry from major fisheries and on models that predict the chemistry of fish tissues from different regions.

“This ties into our work indicating the value of fish in terms of a resource to eat or as a means to reduce carbon by looking at the chemical amounts of it,” said Clive. “This is vital information to both fisheries and environmental organisations.”

DR RYAN REISINGER

Lecturer, School of Ocean and Earth Science

Dr Ryan Reisinger has a particular interest in krill as a vital source of food for whales – the marine mammals he has spent his career tracking and researching.

In Antarctica, there are huge numbers of consumers that feed and rely on krill, like penguins and seals. Krill is a small, swimming crustacean that lives in large schools or swarms.

“Krill feed many animals in the ocean, but they are also themselves the subject of commercial fisheries in Antarctica,” explained Ryan. “My colleagues and I identified that one of these fisheries, particularly, overlaps in time and space with the foraging areas of whales, meaning potential competition between krill fisheries and krill consumers is a major management concern.”

Ryan worked with colleagues to understand how the ecosystem-based management approach of the fishery, by which fishing should not interfere with either the population growth of krill or krill-dependent consumers, was working.

“We analysed the space and time distribution of two major krill consumers – humpback and minke whales – and that of krill fishing, off the Western Antarctic Peninsula,” explained Ryan. “We used whale tracking data for 58 humpback whales and 19 minke whales, to develop machine learning models that predict the monthly distribution of whale foraging areas, for six months.

“Using these predictions, we were able to estimate the monthly overlap between whales and fisheries, identifying times and places when and where competition was likely most intense.”

The results demonstrated a mismatch between the space and time scale at which krill fisheries are currently managed, and that at which fisheries operate and consumers forage.

“We found that krill catches had become increasingly spatially concentrated in a small number of hotspots, raising concerns about how local depletion of krill impacts the whales,” said Ryan. “And the information we collated on their foraging behaviour is fundamental to future precautionary management of the krill fishery, particularly the need for the fishery to more closely align the space and time scale of likely predator-fishery interactions.” With the current management approach, the fishery might appear sustainable overall, but it may in fact be overfishing krill in small areas, at times of the year when whales, seals and penguins most need to eat enough krill to survive.

Ryan and colleagues at the British Antarctic Survey, Scottish Association for Marine Science, and University of California Santa Cruz will tackle this issue in a new project funded by the UK Government through Darwin Plus. They will collect new fine-scale data on the simultaneous distribution and behaviour of krill and whales along the Western Antarctic Peninsula, to understand interactions among krill, whales and fisheries. This information will be used to improve krill fishery management and conserve krill-based Antarctic marine ecosystems. Overall, this project has the potential to make significant contributions towards the sustainable management of the Antarctic ecosystem.

Ryan brought his krill-related research with him to Southampton from the University of California Santa Cruz in America, in 2021. “In addition to the krill project I plan to continue my interest in how we use information about predators for marine conservation and management and to understand broader ecosystem patterns, processes and status,” said Ryan.

DR MARTINA STIASNY

Lecturer, School of Ocean and Earth Science

Dr Martina Staisny is a marine biologist working in fish ecology, evolutionary ecology, and interdisciplinary fisheries science. She is interested in questions related to striking the balance between food security and sustainability in fisheries management and the effects of climate change on fish populations.

She is from Germany, and has also worked in Brussels and Scandinavia before coming to Southampton, both in research but also on the policy side for a regional German Government and the European Commission.

“I am interested in science that can be applied to marine and fisheries policy and solution-driven research,” said Dr Martina Stiasny.

“My keenness for ‘useful’ science comes from my work in policy implementation, I have seen from the other side in terms of using the research, what is needed, what works and what makes the biggest policy impact,” she explained.

“I started working on how climate change affects fish and fisheries because climate change is obviously the biggest challenge my generation faces; how do we mitigate climate change, adapt to changes that are happening, and still feed our children in a healthy way?”

An example of Martina’s work at the National Oceanography Centre, involves looking at how cod and herring eggs and larval fish react to different temperatures as well as other factors like ocean acidification or reduced oxygen concentrations to simulate climate change.

“The crux of the issue for fisheries management is how to ensure as many young fish as possible survive and remain healthy so we can feed a growing population, yet preserve the oceans,” said Martina. “I work mostly with early life stages of fish because they are the most affected by climate changes yet might also be at the core of potential adaptation, plus they are beautiful and great to work with.”

DR CHRIS GOATLEY

Lecturer in the School of Ocean and Earth Science

Having spent the past 17 years in Australia, it is little wonder Dr Chris Goatley’s area of expertise is coral reefs. Specifically, the tiny fish, referred to by scientists as cryptobenthic reef fishes, or simply “cryptos,” which seemingly help to keep coral reefs alive.

“Southampton may not have a coral reef on its doorstep, but it does have a wide range of expertise and incredible facilities for studying the evolution and ecology of tiny fish” explained Chris. “With cryptos being so small, we need to use high-tech methods such as DNA barcoding and micro-CT scanning to study how they feed and what feeds on them.”

Coral reefs support a huge wealth of life, but they grow in what are essentially ‘marine deserts’ because they thrive in clear, warm water which has very little plankton and very few nutrients. So how come their populations don’t collapse?

“The tiny crypto fish help keep the reef alive by recycling nutrients,” explained Chris. “They are highly abundant on coral reefs but only live for a few months before they are eaten by predators. They can reproduce within a month of being born and feed on reef waste (called detritus) that would otherwise be lost to waves and currents. By eating detritus, then being eaten themselves, they efficiently recycle the nutrients which sustain reef life. We need to understand how reefs survive, and essentially recycle their own material and matter so that we can ensure their preservation and existence. These crypto fish seem to be highly significant in that process and as such, there needs to be a clear understanding of how they survive and thrive.

“These crypto fish communities exist in ecosystems around the world, on reefs but also in almost every other marine ecosystem. The UK has a wide variety of cryptobenthic fishes” explained Chris. “My work at the moment is looking at them in the field and understanding how they change in different water types and what their role is in UK waters and how we can ensure their role for the future.”