A University of Queensland researcher is set to investigate how organisms living in the marine environment adapt to pollution.
Dr Dustin Marshall, from the School of Integrative Biology, has received a $70,000 UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award, which will be used to help uncover the evolutionary consequences of pollution in the sea.
The UQ Foundation Research Excellence Awards have been run for 10 years and are an initiative of UQ to recognise outstanding performance and leadership potential in early career researchers.
“For me this is a new branch of research and, I think, an Australian first,” Dr Marshall said.
“Essentially I am asking, ‘over many generations, what genetic change is pollution likely to cause?’
“Also, ‘will pollution make organisms more susceptible to extinction?’’’
Dr Marshall will focus his research on one animal- the sea squirt, or Microcosmus squamiger, which has a two-month lifespan, is easy to catch and is found in Moreton Bay.
“It’s not very charismatic, but very easy to work on – a good lab rat for the sea,” he said.
“We’ll be looking at how things like freshwater runoff affect the evolution of these organisms under field conditions, a first for marine research.
“By monitoring changes in growth rate and their resistance to other stresses, we’ll be able to tell whether the sea squirts evolve to develop a tolerance to pollution.”
Dr Marshall said previous research, including his own, had focused on the ecological consequences of human activity on the marine environment.
“Pollution causes death and increases susceptibility to disease,” he said.
“These are ecological effects in that they have consequences for the distribution and abundance of the organism.
“The evolutionary consequences of pollution are more focused on the longer term impacts of the presence of pollution.
“By only considering ecological changes, we could be simultaneously overestimating and underestimating the consequences of pollution. Overestimating because organisms can adapt faster than we thought to novel selection pressure, underestimating because adaptation to one stress typically carries a cost in terms of resistance to another.”
Dr Marshall said the project formed “the first crucial step” in this area of research, but the results could potentially be used to speculate on how other marine animals cope with pollution.
Postdoctoral researchers, PhD students and research assistants from UQ’s Marine Evolutionary Ecology Unit will combine their skills to complete this two-year project.
Media: Dr Marshall (07 3365 7959, 0418 867 242, d.marshall1@uq.edu.au) or Penny Robinson at UQ Communications (07 3365 9723, penny.robinson@uq.edu.au).
