Stranded Signals: What Forensic Physiology Reveals About Scottish Marine Mammals
Supervisors:
Dr Neal J Dawson School of Biodiversity, One Health and Veterinary Medicine, University of Glasgow
Dr Michael Scantlebury, School of Biological Sciences, Queen’s University Belfast
Dr Dominic J McCafferty, School of Biodiversity, One Health and Veterinary Medicine, University of Glasgow
Dr Andrew Brownlow, School of Biodiversity, One Health and Veterinary Medicine, University of Glasgow
Summary:
Every year, hundreds of whales, dolphins and seals strand around the Scottish coastline. While tragic, these events provide a unique opportunity to understand why marine mammals die and how they are adapted to life in the ocean. A major challenge, however, is determining whether tissues still preserve meaningful information about an animal's physiology before death.
This PhD will develop a novel "Metabolic Clock" by measuring the predictable decline in mitochondrial function and muscle enzyme activity after death. Using the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme (SMASS) tissue archive (one of the world's largest collections of marine mammal samples), the student will establish decay profiles that estimate time since death, identify when tissues remain suitable for physiological analyses and, where the post-mortem interval is known, reconstruct pre-mortem metabolic activity. Integrating these estimates with oceanographic drift models will improve predictions of where stranded animals died, strengthening investigations into threats such as fisheries bycatch, ship strikes and disease outbreaks.
The validated methods will then be applied to investigate how mitochondrial function has evolved to support prolonged breath-hold diving, developing innovative tools for marine wildlife forensics while advancing our understanding of marine mammal physiology and evolution.