Human activities (e.g., marine construction and fishing) have been demonstrated to significantly impact cetacean populations. This displaces animals from feeding grounds, impair foraging or directly reduce the amount of food available. This forces the animal to use stored energy reserves, which directly impacts the animal’s metabolism, reducing the energy that an animal can invest in maintaining health and supporting reproduction. Our ability to protect these species is limited by the fact that we do not fully understand the mechanisms that regulate their energy metabolism and resilience, and thus predict and measure the physiological costs of human activities.
One significant barrier to achieve this understanding, is that the physiological mechanisms involved in regulating energy metabolism differ considerably from what we know from the ‘classic’ model systems. The evolution of cetaceans from a terrestrial to aquatic species led to fundamental adaptation of their physiology (e.g., thickened subcutaneous blubber layer) and metabolism [1]. Dolphins display a unique physiological response to 24h fasting, with a rapid switch to fat and amino acid instead of glucose in a terrestrial model species [2]. The switch to protein as energy fuel is likely a mechanism to protect the blubber as it serves other functions (e.g., insulation and buoyancy). Thus, there is a physiological constraint on how much energy cetaceans can draw from blubber. Many of the characteristics of blubber and other tissues involved in energy metabolism are poorly understood, and the influence metabolic processes in these tissues have on individual health characteristics remain unclear.
This project will disentangle the role of different fats (subcutaneous and visceral fat) and organs (liver, muscle) in health and energy storage in harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena). It is impossible to gather this kind of information from free ranging porpoises. Therefore, the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme (SMASS) provides the unique opportunity to collect tissues from stranded animals and to gather information on their ‘ecological health’ such as age, sex, morphometric indices of body condition, disease burden, cause of death and pathology. Tissue samples from harbour porpoises with different energy status (e.g. starved vs non-starved) will be collected, and the project will identify the ‘metabolic fingerprint‚’ in these samples by looking at cellular expression of proteins (proteomics) based on an established protocol [3]. This project will take a systems physiology approach where it will integrate the metabolic fingerprint with the ‘ecological health’ measures.
The student will become familiar with modern molecular, statistical and bioinformatic approaches, pathway visualisation programs and any required wet lab techniques to help understand the different roles of organs in metabolism, and how they are related to overall health. This project is data-intensive and will lead to development of new tools and methods which will be valuable to other scientists in the field. This project integrates the fields of bioinformatics, systems physiology, and conservation ecology. The project team consists of Dr Davina Derous and Dr Alex Douglas (University of Aberdeen, UK), Dr Joanna Kershaw (Plymouth, UK), Dr Andrew Brownlow (SMASS‚ University of Glasgow, UK) and Professor David Lusseau (DTU, Denmark).
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