School of Biodiversity, One Health & Veterinary Medicine

Strategies for resource acquisition and life history variation in salmon

I have a long-term programme of research into individual variation in resource acquisition in fish.  Specifically, I wish to understand why some individuals are consistently aggressive and fight over limited resources (food, for example), whereas others avoid conflict and use alternative tactics for acquiring contested resources. I am interested in the genetic and physiological mechanisms that underlie such variation, as well as its consequences for growth and life history patterns. Recent and current studies on this topic include comparison of neuroendocrine profiles in individual three-spined stickleback with different behavioural phenotypes (jointly with Alison Bell, University of Illinois, Svante Winberg, Norwegian School of Veterinary Science and Tom Pottinger, CEH, Lancaster and funded by a fellowship to AB from the NSF) and the causes and consequences of variable rates of development in Altantic salmon (jointly with Hans Gjoen and colleagues at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, As, Norway, funded by the Norwegian Research Council).