Today is a big day for the CollinLab.
Kecia Kerr, the first PhD student from the CollinLab
successfully defended her dissertation.
After 5 years of hard work and intensive questioning on her
research, Kecia will be awarded a PhD from the NEO Program at McGill University. It’s a
great accomplishment and her project has produced some cool results.
Working with fiddler crabs, Kecia focused on how changes in
temperature influence the timing of reproduction. These crabs are good mothers and after
brooding their eggs, they time hatching to occur when predation risk is lowest
for the hatching larvae. In most places around
the world female crabs release their tiny larvae at night on the days with the biggest
tides. We think this is because predatory fish can’t see the larvae very well
at night. And, that during large tides the
water sucks the larvae offshore to safer areas; away from predators that are
more common in the shallow water.
Climate change is expected to alter the seasonal upwelling
of cold water that normally happens between January and May here in Panama. It is likely that the intensity and also the
frequency of these events will increase.
Kecia wanted to know if the crabs will be able to adjust to the more
variable temperatures we expect to have in the future.
Changes in temperature can alter the rate of
development. So how can the crabs ensure
that their larvae hatch at the right time?
Kecia found that different species do different things. One species can predict the temperatures that
they will experience while they brood.
They use their experience of current temperatures to adjust when they
mate and lay their eggs. Females of the
other species are not flexible in when they mate or lay eggs. Instead these crabs can adjust the temperature
experienced by their eggs: The females
move up and down in their burrows finding the right temperatures to keep their
eggs on track to hatch on time.
Even with these strategies the crabs sometimes make errors
and release their larvae on the wrong days.
How these errors effect the survival of the crabs is a question Kecia
hopes to answer in the future.
Kecia’s first dissertation chapter is already
published. You can read it in Marine Ecology Progress Series here: http://www.int-res.com/articles/feature/m459p001.pdf
Watch these videos to get an idea of what Kecia’s fieldwork
is like.
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