Profile

I moved to Oban to take up my research. I love working here as the University it’s right on the beach and there is so much to see in nature close by. In my spare time I golf and play rugby, but i also play video games semi seriously – I have competed in the Apex Legends Challenger circuit!

I have grown polychaete worms on aquaculture waste – fish poo! I have studied how different waste from different aquauclture species such as salmon and shrimp affect worm growth and their nutrition. I have also studied the bacteria of the sediment, worm gut and waste to see how different environmental factors, such as temperature and light, impact their healthy gut bacteria.

I have found that worms have gut bacteria drastically different to the sand they exist in, and the bacteria found in their gut stimulate the uptake of high value elements such as carbon, nitrogen and sulfur! This means they can use these elements for things like growth, protein synthesis and essential acid synthesis. This is really cool because these worms can be used to feed the aquaculture fish which produced the waste they were fed on! Its all one big circle.

When i arrive in the aquarium, it’s feeding time. I’ll feed my sea cucmbers and shrimps. The worms are fed through an automatic pump, so i make sure their poo bucket is full for the day so they can be continually fed. I’ll take tank measurements such as temperature, light levels and redox potential of the sediment to make sure that theres nothing out of the ordinary. For the shrimp, i check their water nutrient levels and clean out the protein skimmers and check the sump tanks for any escapee’s! I randomly sample 3 shrimp per tank for health parameters and take agar plate samples to make sure they aren’t ill or injured.

I record all my data and observations in my lab book before my coffee break. I move to the lab for the afternoon and i am often doing DNA extractions of sand or animal tissue, usually gut parts. Then depending on what i want to see, i’ll send my samples for sequencing or i will run a qPCR to have a look at different gene’s in my samples, and what they mean – for example i found a high volume of NrfA gene in a sediment samples, which means that a really uncommon nitrogen pathway was occuring in my tanks!

This can run until about 5pm, where i go home afterwards. In the evening, i’ll often be on my computer doing all the fancy analysis and coding to make sense of my DNA data.