Climate change research at IBAHCM

Naturally speaking. Hello and welcome to Naturally speaking. I'm Tia Ford and I'm here today with Joey Humboldt to bring you a special episode on climate change as we head towards hugely important top 26 UN climate change conference that will be hosted here in Glasgow starting October 31st 2021. Here at the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine, our research covers an impressive breadth of disciplines.

Many of them have projects that study the impacts of climate change on animal ecology and the wider environment. Today we're joined by several members of the Institute as well as of the Hunterian Museum to hear more about the diversity of climate related research going on locally. We'd like to start by highlighting an initiative of the Hunterian Museum, which is the COP26 Science Showcase. To tell us about it, we have with us Jan Robinson, who is the curator of Entomology as well as my brother, who is the curator of Zoology and Environment.

Welcome to both of you. Perhaps could you start by telling us a bit about the showcase? Certainly. So the science showcase is a space in the main Hunterian Museum upstairs and there we have rotating the space that lasts about three to six months.

And as the name suggests, the idea is to showcase the latest in research and activities that are going on in our science and medical departments. And there's a couple of cases up there, there's potential for AV and there's a big wall for information and graphics to support it. And with COP approaching, we're very keen to showcase the climate change research that the department was undertaking. And we got in touch with Rudy Meger and Sean Killen initially to discuss the potential projects that we could do.

So we have got a dismay coming up in that space. Just to say, in terms of sustainability, basically it showcases material from our collections and also scientific equipment and other objects from the researchers themselves. Those are all brought in locally, so we haven't got any fossil fuels contributing to display materials being brought in. And the graphics themselves are all printed onto something called Re-board, which is a form of very thick paper that is made from recycled fibers and can be recycled by paper afterwards.

So we have tried to keep things as sustainable as we can. And Mike has been very much as the moderator, the lead in the object. So we can tell you a bit more about those. Yeah, so it was a lovely opportunity for a personal museum to work with live researchers at the work and with Rudy's work on some seabirds and Samuel food chains in the North Sea.

We're nicely able to go and look around the collections and find examples of the sort of gillamots and kitty-weeks and sand eels. We've got mounted specimens of these birds that were collected almost 100 years ago, but they're still in good condition, nice bit on display. And we had some fairly recent collections of sand eels that I freshly preserved for the display as well on the spirit. And it was nicely able to use these old specimens in the collection as well as create some new materials and also on this display.

But I really love the way that they're working with other researchers, Neil and Emily are connected with the displays who are wonderful crafters and actually created some new objects for us for these displays. Origami, Plankton and Crocheted and Edomies, but I'll let Neil tell you more about that later. But it's been this about the Pantere Museum overall, if it's been looking at how we can tell more climate change stories. So as well as the science showcase, we also have been doing what's called interventions.

So instead of spending lots of resources and time and money creating whole new displays, what we did was go around as curators. And we're looking at objects that are currently on display in the main Ontario Museum and the R Gallery and the Macintosh House in the Logic Museum and figuring out how we can tell climate change stories using those existing objects and then just putting labels on the outside of the cases, telling those stories. And it's kind of scary when you start looking, you realize everything has some climate change connection. For example, we've got a pair of snowshoes that came from Hudson Bay in Canada and you can look there and go, right, these are made over 150 years ago, but climate predictions are showing that snow levels in Hudson Bay are decreasing by 5% each year.

How long before snowshoes are never used in Hudson Bay again? We've got a graph of beautiful wine, crystal graph used by an admiral in the Navy that contained claret wine, which was run from 150 to 200 years ago, but the claret beach and where the grapes were produced is changing. And so claret's the future and it takes a different, and on and on, every subject you look at can see how climate change is either going to alter the things you've been passed or also warnings from old objects. We have, for example, Irish elk antlers in the displays and changing climate in the past, changing habitats and so on contributed largely to the experience of the Irish elk.

So these are warnings from the past as well in our collections. And it's just using all these different objects we have to try and spread the message basically. One of my favorite ones I've found in the art gallery is a lady taking tea by Chardonn as one of William Hunter's original paintings and tea crops are changing. The most basic of British needs may be no longer available in the future, it will taste different or all the other issues coming to the fore.

So that's what we're trying to highlight with our collections. Thank you so much, Mike and Jean, for telling us about this exciting event. We're lucky to have with us today three researchers whose work is featured at this show this first Bethany Cortez at postdoc at the University of Glasgow, working with Sean Keilin, whose research focuses on fish, eco physiology and particularly how they're sponsored to environmental changes. Her work featured in the 26th Science and Social Case took place in French Polynesia on the effects of an enemy reaching in fan fish, which are also known as an enemy fish.

Bethany, thanks for joining us. Could you summarize what your work is about? Thank you very much. So, yes, climate change is causing increasing ocean temperature and heat waves and this is increasing the frequency intensity and duration of climate reaching events.

But as I'm not the only one that bleached or the invertebrates, like C&M, also bleached as I respond to temperature stress and so they will lose their day of colour full algae that live in their tissue and turn on white. If they bleached, what's called as an anemone? It can survive and record it, but these can take care of several months and many animals live in a situation with called as an anemone and can therefore be affected as well by this event. Therefore, bleaching can have cutting effects on all those associated communities and contributing to adoption of the diversity and to colour with degradation as well.

So, in this context, our research is focused on the effects of an anemone bleaching on a t-shirt, the she-behavioral and survival of the orange phenonymin, which is a species of clownfish and so as all the clownfish are once he has settled into an anemone, they will live in communities with them spending their lives there and they cannot survive in the wilder without them. What have been some of the most interesting findings in this research? So, we found that other species are affected by increasing their stress response to the increase the production in cultivars when they are anemone bleached and also they decrease the reproductive hormones such as histodiol and esocerem and they also reduce their production. In a different study on the anemone bleached, we found that when they are exposed to anemone bleaching for about two weeks, they increase their metabolism likely because they are stressed.

But when they are exposed for longer than a month, they will progressively decrease their metabolism, they will be more or less and also modify their behaviour becoming less active. So, together those results suggest that the anemone bleached are at an energetic disadvantage and there is an increase in the negative impact of anemone bleaching over time, greater than an acclimation of the fish with new conditions. And besides that we do not observe the direct effects on fish survival, the lower growth might have carryover effects later in life. For example, in competition and reproduction, which is particularly relevant in anemone fish because they have a longer size dependent erective where the access to the breeding condition depends on fish size.

Overall, those findings highlight the direct-your-breaching events and emphasise that they need to regulate the connection, the contribute to climate change with the events and the including bleaching. Many people are familiar with the idea of coral bleaching, but I don't know if we have all really appreciated all of the knock-on effects in the ecosystems. So, thank you so much for sharing that really interesting research with us. We will turn next to other research that is featured at the Hunterian 26 Showcase.

This is led by Dr. Neil Benes and Dr. Roody Neger who both join us today. Neil is an oceanographer and mathematical ecologist based at the University of Strathide and who is also an affiliate of the Institute.

And Roody is research focuses on how organisms, particularly birds, cope with the environment in which they live. Having worked on seabirds for many years, how they cope with changes in the marine environment is of particular interest. So, welcome. Could you maybe start by telling us a bit about this particular research that you collaborate on?

Sure. So, this project began a few years ago when Roody and I and our PhD students, Agnes Olen, had the idea to try to trace climate and ocean change impacts on UK seabirds all the way up the food chain without skipping any steps. In other words, actually giving full consideration to the plankton and then the forage fish that eat the plankton and the birds themselves. Because we know the ocean is changing and we know that many UK seabird populations have been declining.

But actually connecting those things step by step is almost never done. There's too many pieces in the puzzle. So Agnes came to this project with a background in seabird biology but he actually spent most of her time in the PhD really diving into the mechanics of how sand deals select prey and their energy budgets and things like that. And also big historical surveys of changes in the plankton.

And the main thing that she found is that if you approach the zooplankton data from the point of view of a fish, in other words, considering everything that could be added up to make a meal in the ocean, you find evidence of change that you miss if you just look at the one or two favorite species that oceanographers like to talk about all the time. For example, if you're a little five centimeter sand deal off the coast of Scotland and it's your first summer, then the best food that's out there is a few species of crustacean plankton, like large cupopods and krill, a few millimeters long that have mainly been carried into the North Sea by currents from the open North Atlantic. So they represent a link with really large scale ocean processes that haven't contributed a very clear historical trend but are implicated in people's fears about future climate change for our oceans. Meanwhile, there's another community of really small little crustaceans, I mean really small little ones that have grown locally in the coastal North Sea and also can be added up in larger numbers to make a meal for a sand deal.

And what Agnes found is that these smaller species are the ones that have collectively declined in the places where sand deal growth has also been declining. So taken altogether, this tells us that predicting future change is going to require taking a really multi-scale view from the whole North Atlantic and changes in the conveyor belt circulation of the ocean down to what you can actually see from the beach in the coastal North Sea and how that connects to the seabirds that really carry on with. So what I want to add a little bit to what Neil just said at the beginning, the origin about that project is when Neil and I, with our families, did the same journey on a very out to Canada to the same event and we're on the same journey with the same direction but talking to each other, we realized we were scientifically on a journey in opposite direction and we're meeting somewhere in the middle which is the sand deal. So we needed somebody to cover the sand deal and that brought the fantastic partners all in and she showed these changes in sand deal size and it's of course it's not only the size of the sand deals which are changing, they also have become scarcer and possibly have changed the thinology but we have the best state of growth and size of sand deals and that's why we focus on that what happened later in that trophy chain and we know that sand deals are important drivers of seabird breeding success so for example, Agnes has analyzed the spatial synchrony and breeding success of kitty vakes along the UK North Sea coast and found several clear clusters where breeding success fluctuated in synchrony and these clusters matched remarkably well the known sub-populations of sand deals that each show distinct dynamics so that the shrinking sand deals basically what they mean for seabirds more work as the sand deal have gotten smaller the amount of energy in a single sand deal has declined even faster so a small sand deal is really a poor meal for a seabird and that has serious implications for seabirds but it might vary between species depending on what foraging ecology they are having so for instance kitty vakes they specialize on small young of the year sand deals and they are available later in the year but they can hoover up lots of them on a single foraging trip and Agnes calculated that kitty vakes now need to catch roughly twice the number of sand deals to feed the chicks then they needed to do 30 to 40 years ago in order to make up for that smaller size of the sand deals today getting them off on the other hand they can't catch lots of fish and carry them home they can only carry one fish at the time so for each extra fish they need to make up for the smaller size they have to make a separate journey back to the cliff to feed the chicks so they can only do that by specializing on larger fish so they go for adult sand deals and other large fish which are typically occur early in the season and breed early in the season then and kitty vakes but even then in order to cope with the declines in size they have also deliver more fish and they have to do more journeys and this is costly to them both in energy and time and one of our master students Rory pomson estimated these extra energetic and time costs to breeding elements and his model suggests that the time cost is the more important one and in a few decades again it won't have enough time in a day to feed their chicks on small fish and that's even if they are compensating for each other and they switch their diet to larger break times and in order to improve of course their time for foraging for more fish sea birds will have to leave the chicks for more time unattended and in a warming world this causes another problem a lot of them nest in cliffs and they are really heat straps in the summer sun so the birds cannot passively dissipate heat so they have to do that actively to avoid heat stress and again that is energetically costly to them and costs more fish for the parents to bring and they're already strapped for time to bring these more fish but heat stress can also negatively affect the health of the birds so this illustrates how complex the effects of climate change are when they're starting is the small copper boat and they arrive in the end at the seabird and that's what you're trying to show in that showcase which Jean and Mike have wonderfully put together thank you both okay thank you very much and Neil and Rudy for that summary it's really interesting to think how the impacts of climate change will detriment your best kind of agridates up the food chain affecting more charismatic animals as well as the small ones that people don't normally see and we hope that all the listeners will have the opportunity to check out this showcase at the Hunterian Museum from early November but research related to climate change is even more widespread at the institute we highlight some of this with our next four guests we'll now turn to the research of Professor Nick Hanley an environmental economist who mainly works on the application of economic methods to biodiversity conservation invasive species and measures of sustainability welcome Nick we understand that you have a few different projects related to climate change could you tell us a bit about these yeah thanks very much I mentioned three things that we have been in our working on so the first general issue that we work on is what some people refer to as nature based solutions as part of climate change policy so this is where we're using how land is managed to do one of two things firstly to reduce our net emissions greenhouse gases and secondly to reduce the damages that we will suffer from climate change so the negative impacts so the basic idea from an economics perspective it is well how do you incentivize land managers landowners to change how they manage land in a way which is going to increase the amount of carbon that gets locked up in soils for example or how do you encourage them to change how they manage livestock in a way which is going to reduce net emissions so some of the things we're thinking about are for example heatland restoration and woodland planting and what role could that play within a national uk strategy and how could we generate additional economic incentives to land managers so they did more of that effectively and so the kind of mechanisms that we look at are carbon trading carbon taxes and payments for existing service schemes so that's all about changing land use in a way which is going to essentially reduce our net emissions and or reduce future damages the second area we've worked on is to do with one of the major impacts of climate change which is flooding so we're really interested in the use of so called natural flood defenses or soft flood defenses for example managed realignment of the coast or creating coastal wetlands or restoring coastal wetlands and one particular project we worked on on the tastery was looking at the willingness of local people to support a policy which would essentially switch away from traditional hard defenses which are made of concrete and which you just have to build higher and higher to soft more natural flood defenses like restored wetlands because clearly if people don't want these things in place as a replacement then they're probably not going to happen so we've done a lot of work looking at public preferences for these more natural flood defense systems but also at what are these sort of additional benefits we might get from soft flood defenses so additional benefits for biodiversity additional benefits for recreation and how could we measure those in economic terms the final piece of work is something that we've only just started and it's rather different and it's joined with a fantastic PhD student who I share with economics a woman called Ellen Cunningham so what we're looking at there is the impact of increasing water insecurity in Sudan on education our field work is going to be focused in and around car too and what we've already established is that for many children the experience of a day at school is greatly diminished by their lack of access to safe drinking water so children are either having to take time off of school in the mornings or the evenings to go look for water essentially so what we're doing is a program of field work to try and quantify what are the current impacts of this water insecurity on how many hours children can spend at school and then what the educational outcomes are and then just as importantly what would be the impact of a particular intervention which is the supply of domestic water purification technology to see how that might be predicted to impact on water scarcity and water insecurity and therefore on education outcomes we're doing that jointly with an Austrian NGO so those are the projects we've got going on at the moment and people are very welcome to get in touch with me if they want to learn more.

Thank you so much Nick it's amazing to see the diversity of research going on in the institute all the way from understanding complex ecological changes through to human behavior and mitigation strategies so thank you for sharing all of that. We'll turn next to Dr. Kimberly Formas who is a Stere Henry Dale Fellow whose research focuses on identifying spatial and environmental risk factors for infectious diseases by applying Jewish statistical and machine learning approaches so welcome Kim could you tell us a little bit about your work and how it leads to climate change. Certainly so we like you said we're really focused on understanding how environmental change impacts infectious disease risks but in particularly looking how land use changes such as deforestation interact with wider climate and demographic changes that drive disease emergence so we're actually working across a number of different disease systems in ecological settings so we have projects looking at Ebola in West Africa and malaria and Peruvian Amazon but really kind of one of the main focuses is looking at the emergence of the humanotic malaria plasmonia and moleside in relation Borneo so this is a type of malaria which is usually carried by the CACs and other non-human primate species and transmitted by mosquitoes so it's been known for quite a long time that this type of malaria could infect people and but really there was no evidence until very recently that this was a public health problem at all until a large number of cases were identified in 2004 so in the past kind of two decades we've seen that reported numbers of human cases of nulls by increased dramatically so with thousands of cases of nulls I reported every year from across Southeast Asia and this is now the main cause of human malaria in Malaysia so it's a big barrier towards achieving malaria elimination goals so our work is really focused on trying to understand what's driving this emergence is doing on a malaria within this region and we've shown this is really strongly associated with deforestation and changing patterns of agricultural land use so it's a kind of dig beneath this association and understand the mechanisms which are driving this we use a really wide range of technologies so we're mapping fine scale changes in forest cover using earth observation data from drones and satellites tracking human and macaque movements by GPS and using a range of methods that capture spatiotemporal distributions of mosquito vectors relative to land use and climatic variables so we've been able to show through these methods that land use changes and forest fragmentation is really driving these disease risks by increasing the spatial overlap of these different populations of forest edges.

Thanks so much Kim, it's a really amazing combination of methods that you're using on obviously disease emergence is kind of at the forefront of all of our minds these days and understanding how climate change might survive that moving forward is very timely so thank you for sharing that message with us. We'll turn next to Dr. Kevin Parsons research which takes an evolutionary perspective on determining how populations will respond to climate change so this focuses primarily on developmental changes which could be considered at the frontline of responses so for example occurring before demographic changes in the population so Kevin thanks so much for joining us can you tell us a little bit about how your current work ties into climate change. Thank you so we have a problem with looking at populations they have a choice of climate change of sometimes migrating away from a habitat if it becomes too unsuitable but there's other species and populations that are sort of stuck in place and have limited opportunities to migrate and freshwater fish fit this situation quite often because they're in these closed water bodies and we have a study system that is naturally heated above the ambient temperature because of geothermal activity in Iceland and it's almost like a natural experiment where you have cold and warm population next to each other and we're not talking about big latitude and no gradient and so you have this replication of warm and cold and different timescales too like in line with what climate change would predict so things that have been set out for 70 years but also populations that have had these differing temperatures for over a couple thousand years and that gives us a really strong opportunity to look at what evolution does under a warned scenario and so we can do that in a way that's almost like I say an experiment where things are controlled for latitude and day length and all the other things that would make a habitat differ are the same except for temperature so the the fish are evolving and they're evolving very quickly within 70 years they're showing paratable changes in their facial structure possibly that's to do with how development is affected by warmer temperatures it speeds up development but it also could be that the dynamics of the ecosystems they live in has totally changed and they're feeding on different food as a result of being in warmer water and that's resulted in evolution they also have evolved different appetites as well so being in warm water raises the metabolism of fish and when we bring these fish into the lab for a couple generations where everything's controlled we see there's heritability in geothermal fish wanting to eat twice as much as an ambient fish and there's some really unexpected things that actually seems like geothermal fish evolved in a way that they have traits resembling diabetes or metabolic syndrome in humans as a way of dealing with a winter where it's warm but there's little insect larvae there are very few prey items for them to feed on during winter so they have all these metabolic adaptations that actually we can now use to actually study disease too like diabetes as well but in the context of what climate change might do to natural populations.

Many thanks Evan, yes it's very interesting and very concerning to think about how that climate change can impact upon the ecology and physiology of these freshwater fish which are normally unable to migrate. Last but not least we have with us naturally speaking its own Lucy Gilbert. Lucy is an animal ecologist specializing in multi-tropic interactions with particular expertise on pests and parasites especially the ecology of tick-borne diseases and the ecology of ticks. Lucy what aspects are you work or linked to climate change?

Oh hi well my main research focuses on ticks and tick-borne diseases such as Lyme disease and I'm particularly interested in how environmental changes affect tick populations and the risk of tick-borne diseases and of course one of the major environmental changes at the moment is is crack changes we all know. So I got various focuses and one of them is on direct effects of climate change on tick populations and Lyme disease risk and by direct effects I mean the actual climate excel for things like temperature and humidity directly affecting ticks and ticks are particularly prone to the climate because they live off the host most of the time and we know that at least in a cold country such as Scotland the exodis risk list takes to the main tick species we have. You know that temperature as you increase the temperature in a cold climate of Scotland their survival increases their developmental speed between tick stages increases so they develop faster but also their activity increases so a higher proportion of the population will be active as the temperature increases and obviously if you're in a hot dry country such as you know the south of Spain or Greece if you increase the temperature you actually get less than activity and less ticks of evil but when you're in a cold country such as Scotland or Norway as the temperature warms you'll get higher tick activity and higher ticks of evil and higher tick developmental speeds. So what we're finding is that from model predictions and from empirical data is that at least in Scotland as the climate is warming we're getting higher tick abundance generally we're getting ticks are able to be active for more of the year so so later into autumn and winter and they'll start being active earlier in the spring but also we're finding that there'll be active higher up the hills so as you walk up and run row you should be safe from ticks but maybe by 2080 you'll be over a row and you you could actually get bitten by a tick up there because they're moving up the hills but what is often mess with climate change studies is how resilient species might be to climate change and this is one of the most interesting things that we're finding is that we think that exo-teas-risanist ticks may be actually quite resilient to climate change in terms of temperature increase so I did a really nice experiment a few years ago and I collected ticks from the north of Scotland and England Wales and the south of France and I put them in the lab and exposed them to increased temperatures and I found that they behaved really differently so these are the same species of tick in the same lab at the same time but I found that Scottish ticks are really active at low temperatures because they have to be because it's such a cold climate if they weren't then they'd never be active so basically I found that let's take seven degrees Celsius that's a really cool day but 40% of Scottish ticks are actually active only seven degrees Celsius whereas in France less than 10% of the ticks were active so we know that they've been adapted their local thermal climate so I guess you could predict from that that let's say by 2080 or you know a bit later than that if Scotland has a similar thermal climate to central or southern France maybe our ticks will by then have adapted to that new climate so that when it's seven degrees the won't be 40% of them active at all maybe there'll be only 10% will be active so maybe it won't be as bad as we think it will be so that was a direct effect of climate change on ticks the other focus of my work is indirect effects of climate change and this is things like nature-based solutions which is what Nick Hamley was talking about just now woodland expansion for example or peatland restoration so planting woodlands is a major way of helping mitigate climate change and there are various ways that might affect ticks and Lyme disease risk so woodlands have a lovely sort of warm and humid microclimate that helps tick survival and woodlands also tend to have high biodiversity and more animals in the more hosts of the ticks to feed on and more hosts for the the pathogen of the causes Lyme disease so things like rodents squirrels mice and birds that carry the pathogen they're more common in woodlands as well so but we're also interested in how to solve this problem so we might predict that more woodlands might mean more ticks and more Lyme disease risk but what about solutions to this problem we're hoping that as we do more research on the different types of woodland and different types of woodland management and how that affects ticks we're hoping that we might be able to inform how you plan and manage woodlands so you still get the climate change mitigation benefits but you can also help to control Lyme disease risk at the same time by planting different species or different sort of fragmentation of forest or deer control for example then this peatland restoration which is another way that we're trying to mitigate climate change because peatlands sequester is carbon it's a very good way of doing flood control as well downstream and I've done some research as this wonderful place called the forcing art which is owned by the RSVP where they are doing massive peatland restoration project and the good news is that they're finding that as you restore the peatlands the number of ticks actually plummets and the Lyme disease risk will go right down to virtually nothing and the reason for that is that ticks actually don't like it to be too wet they don't like bobby ground and deer which carry ticks they also don't really like getting wet either so they don't tend to hang around in bobby ground so with climate change direct effects and indirect effects there's sort of some good news and some bad news you know they're working harder trying to find out what we can do about it thanks Lucy I just like to thank all of the panelists for joining us today it's been fascinating hearing about the incredibly diverse research associated with climate change that's ongoing at the Institute and I think it's an important reminder of the wide-ranging effects that we might anticipate having to mitigate should be failed to slow our global carbon emissions so it's good to know that we have so many excellent people working in this area to help us use a pair of these complicated connections thank you very much again and thank you all for listening thanks for listening to the Naturally Speaking podcast if you've got any ideas for future shows or want to get involved and please contact us we'd love to hear from you our email address is naturallyspeakingpodcast at gmail.com naturally speaking is a podcast from the Institute of Biodiversity Animal Health and Parent Medicine at the University of Glasgow and more information you can find us on Facebook you can find us on Twitter at the nspodcast and you can download future episodes and find more information at our blog at naturysmetingputpass.webpress.com