Current Lab
Shaun Killen,
Principal investigator
Shaun is a Professor of Ecophysiology at the University of Glasgow, in the School of Biodiversity, One Health, and Veterinary Medicine. He is interested in the physiological and behavioural ecology of animals and especially how energetic demand influences trade-offs involved with foraging and predator-avoidance behaviour. During his PhD at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada (2007), he studied how metabolic traits interact with behaviour throughout early development in larval marine fishes. His current work examines on how environmental change affects relationships between behavioural and physiological traits in an ecological context, often focusing on animal social behaviour. Killen has also examined the physiological effects of catch-and-release angling in fishes. Most recently, this line of inquiry into physiology and mechanics of fish capture is being extended to the study of mechanisms underlying fisheries-induced evolution.
Barbara KOECK,
Post-Doctoral Associate
Barbara’s research broadly encompasses fish and fisheries ecology, with a particular interest in behavioural and spatial ecology. During her PhD at the University of Perpignan she worked on the effect of habitat modification on fish and fish communities. She also examined structural and functional connectivity of fish populations, linking individual movement patterns with seascape properties and life-history strategies, and modeling larval dispersal to predict priority conservation areas. More recently, during her post-doc at the University of Gothenburg, she studied behavioural mechanisms and responses of fish to human-induced disturbances, such as predation by recreational fishing. In her current work as part of the PHYSFISH project, Barbara will continue this line of research investigating the linkages between individual variability of phenotypic traits, vulnerability to capture and post-release mortality (discards).
DAPHNE CORTESE,
post-doctoral associate
Daphne is broadly interested on fish biology and ecology. Combining laboratory and field studies, she explores the effects of environmental variation, including human-induced changes, on fish physiology and behavior. She carried out her PhD at PSL-EPHE University and based at CRIOBE research station (Centre de Recherches Insulaires et Observatoire de l'Environnement) co-supervised by Suzanne Mills, Ricardo Beldade, and Shaun Killen. Her PhD examined the environmental and phenotypic determinants of larval dispersal, seeking to provide a mechanistic understanding of the dispersal process in marine fishes to allow for more accurate predictions of how fish populations will respond to climate change. Currently, she is postdoc at the University of Glasgow working on the effects of climate change, such as increasing temperature in the water, on fish physiology and behaviour, especially in the context of social behaviour.
Amelia munson,
post-doctoral associate
Amelia is broadly interested in how environmental change affects animals and how experiences can influence how individuals respond to change. Her current work focuses on how elevated temperature and hypoxia influence fish social behavior. During her PhD at the University of California, Davis in the lab of Andy Sih, she studied how elevated temperature and predator experience influence individually consistent behaviors. She is particularly interested in thinking about patterns of experience over the whole life of animals to better understand how they integrate information and predict the state of future environments. In her spare time she likes to draw, read and hike.
Emil Christensen
Research Fellow
Emil is a comparative physiologist and ecologist. His research focusses on how environmental changes affect fish physiology, behaviour, and population ecology both on temporary and evolutionary time scales. Furthermore, a significant component of Emil’s research revolves around developing research tools and methodologies. During his PhD he studied intra-specific differences in physiology and population ecology of European perch in relation to environmental salinity, and has later worked on the thermal physiology and behavioural thermoregulation of the invasive round goby during his first post-doc. At University of Glasgow he holds an independent post-doc fellowship, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, to conduct research on physiological and behavioural components of the temperature-size-rule in fish and how it relates to fish “shrinking” with global warming.
Lucy Cotgrove,
Phd Student
Lucy is primarily interested in population ecology and how this varies under different pressures. For Lucy’s PhD thesis, she is investigating leadership in collective behaviour, focusing on fish behaviour in a project co-supervised by Grant Hopcraft, Colin Torney and Dirk Husmeier. In the future, she aims to look at how this can be used to implement conservation methods leading to improving sustainable seafood practices. Lucy completed her MSc in Marine Biology at Bangor University, Wales where she worked with IMEDEA, Mallorca, exploring the effect of anthropogenically altered water masses on juvenile fish behaviour. Before moving to Glasgow, Lucy worked as a hatchery technician and has been involved in a project with Cefas, exploring population distribution of vulnerable elasmobranchs in the UK.
MAR PINEDA,
PHD STUDENT
Mar is interested in how environmental stressors impact fish physiology and behaviour. Mar completed her BSc in Zoology at the University of Manchester, studying the effects of multiple stressors on elasmobranchs. For her masters project at the University of Glasgow, she is investigated how hypoxia and increasing temperature affect the air-breathing behaviour of social catfish. Mar’s PhD work, which is funded by a studentship from the Fisheries Society of the British Isles, examines the harvest-associated selection in Amazonian ornamental fishes. In her spare time, Mar enjoys science communication and hiking.
Magdalene Papatheodoulou
PhD Student
Magdalene completed her MSci in Marine & Freshwater Biology in 2018 from the University of Glasgow, and over the course of her career has worked on a number of research and consultancy projects, for both the European Union and the private sector. Her interests concentrate on the impacts that anthropogenic activities have on specific species, population and ecosystems, how these change over a period of time, as well as the subsequent influences these can have on the future generations. One of her recent projects examined the effects of pollution on the reproduction and liver of the male benthic Blackmouth catshark (Galeus melastomus) in the Eastern Mediterranean. Her PhD focuses on how catch and release angling affects the physiology and behaviour of the Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), and the effects this has on fish offspring.
MARIE LEVET
phd student
Marie's research interests are focusing on physiology and behavioural ecology. She is interested in fish adaptative responses to abiotic and biotic environmental changes. She first completed a master's degree at the University of Glasgow, where she focused her research project on the effect of anthropogenic noise on fish metabolism and behaviour. She is now completing her Ph.D. research, funded by the GRIL, at the Université de Montréal (Québec, Canada) in co-supervision with Sandra Binning. The core of her thesis is to investigate the host-parasite relationship and how the presence of a parasite affects the behaviour and physiological responses of pumpkinseed sunfish. More specifically, she is looking at changes in temperature and how this can impact the parasite-host dynamic.
Andria Utama,
PhD Student
Andria is a junior fisheries scientist based in Jakarta at the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries (MMAF) Indonesia. He has been working with the ministry over a 9-year career on a wide range of topics in fisheries biology and management including population estimation, mesopelagic deep-sea fish species, fishing by-catch, ALDFG ghostfishing, and analytical tools for tackling illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. Before working for the ministry, he worked as a fish farming technician in trout aquaculture company in Bavaria Southern Germany. He earned a Master’s degree in Fisheries Biology and Management from the University of Bergen Norway, analyzing uncertainty in acoustic survey estimates of Bali sardinella in the Bali Strait, Indonesia. He is doing his PhD research at the university of Glasgow focus on study of spatial dynamics of tuna aggregations around Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs), social aspect of artisanal tuna fisheries, and artisanal tuna fishing vessels behavior. Hopefully, his work will provide a scientific basis of the policy to achieve sustainability of tuna fisheries in Indonesia as the largest tuna-producing country in the world. He is primarily supervised by David Bailey and co-supervised by Shaun Killen.
Lab Affiliates
Libor Zavorka
Libor interested in behavioral ecology, eco-physiology, and ecosystem functioning. He started his PhD working on life history, demographic, and genetic structure of brown trout populations in the mountainous headwaters of Šumava National Park in Czech Republic. However, love for salmonids and cold climate brought him in the last two years of his PhD to Scandinavia and the Salmonid Ecology Group at University of Gothenburg where he studied the effect of intra-specific differences in behavior and physiology on growth and survival of wild brown trout. More recently he worked as apost-doctoral researcher at the University of Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France, where he was looking into various aspects of interactions between non-native species (salmonids and crayfish) and recipient ecosystem and native organisms.
Jolle Jolles
Jolle is a von Humboldt research fellow at the Max Planck Department of Collective Behaviour, Konstanz, Germany. He is interested in the fundamental role individual differences play in collective animal behaviour. In particular, his research focuses on how behavioural variation drives within- and between-group structure and dynamics and how in turn this determines consistent individual differences by its effects on group performance, using three-spined sticklebacks as his main model species. He works with the Killen lab via a Mentorship scheme from the University of Konstanz.
Lab Alumni
PhD Students
Jack Hollins
Davide Thambithurai
Tiffany Armstrong
Julie Nati
Daphne Cortese
Postdocs
Amélie Crespel
Natalie Pilakouta
Travis van Leeuwen
Lingqing Zeng
Shaun Robertson
Technicians
Anita Racz
Masters Students
Toby Miller (MRes, Effects of density on social behaviour in zebrafish)
Isabel Aragao (MRes, Effects of temperature on social networks in Corydoras catfish)
Anna Persson (MSci, Effects of metabolism on assortment within and among fish schools)
Stephanie McLean (MRes, Effects of feeding on spatial positioning of individuals within fish schools)
Brooke Allan (MRes, Interplay between metabolic traits and social hierarchy position in fish)
Ben Cooper (MRes, Exposure to non-preferred temperature as a cost of group-living in fish)
Matt Pace (MSci, Modelling the movement of juvenile Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) through a fragmented seagrass landscape)
Laura Dalgetti (MSci, Differences in substrate preference between wild and domestic zebrafish)
Alyson Casey (MRes, The effects of body size and inter-shoal mixing on social networks in European minnows)
Chris Convery (MRes, The effects of fish socialty on individual vulnerability to capture by pot trap)
Sarah Schembri (MSci, The effect of shoal size on gap-crossing in fragmented habitats in juvenile Atlantic cod)
Michaela Moran (MRes, The effects of olfactory prey cues on spontaneous activity in captive juvenile smallspotted catsharks and thornback rays)
Xiao Hu (MRes, The effect of shoal size on exploratory behvaiour in European minnows)
Kirsty Brown (MRes, The effects of shoal size on aquatic surface respiration during hypoxia in juvenile crucian carp)
Peggy Xirogiannopoulou (MSci, The effect of feeding on temperature preference in tidepool fishes)
Dana Weldon (MRes, The effect of acute temperature change on behaviour in individual European minnows)
Hannele Honkanen (Hon, Eavesdropping and mate choice in swordtails)