I am excited to share that @hannahmcgx.bsky.social's first PhD chapter (with @amydeacon.bsky.social and Francesco Santi) on how oil pollution influences male guppy ornamentation just got published in @ecol-evol.bsky.social
@rhulbiology.bsky.social
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
hopefully this research will raise more questions and prompt further research into the indirect impacts of pollution on our freshwater species !!
Pitch Lake guppies also had the smallest area + darkest intensity of iridescence, the opposite of what is seen in anthropogenically polluted fish. We think this might be because the Pitch Lake has very high levels of predation pressure compared to both the polluted and non-polluted habitats.🦆
fish from the Pitch Lake, a naturally "oil polluted" habitat, didn't follow the same trends as their anthropogenically polluted pals. Pitch lake guppies had the greatest area + darkest intensity of orange, which suggests different environmental pressures in this habitat. 🍊
We thought polluted fish would be less colourful since colour is costly to maintain, but its actually a lot less straightforward !! In anthropogenically polluted habitats, males had a larger area of iridescent colour, which may be due to reduced predation pressure in high pollution areas.
My first publication is out at last !!! 🐟🥳 We looked the effects of oil pollution on colouration, a key sexually selected trait in male guppies. A few key takeaways in the thread below, or read the full text if you want all the juicy details: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
*pitch lake anti-parasite paper: tiny.cc/ylfy001
*pitch lake microbes: www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1...
basically, the Pitch Lake is a really cool +unqiue wetland system and today im giving it its flowers 🌺 theres still so much more to learn about this ancient habitat (theres currently no study on vertebrate or plant diversity) so today lets big up this often overlooked but fascinating ecosystem! <3
like other tar pits, the Pitch Lake is great at preservation, and a number of Amerindian artifacts and prehistoric mammal bones have been uncovered from the goo. The Pitch Lake also has a unique microbial community with potential hydrocarbon degrading microbes found within the tar.
if you visit the Pitch Lake you might see people bathing, or bottling up some of the Pitch water, as it's been said the water is good for the skin. although to look at the black goo you might not believe it, at least for guppies, the Pitch Lake has been seen to have anti-parasitic properties*
Asphalt from the Pitch Lake is used to pave roads not just in Trinidad but all around the world, including (so ive been told) the front of buckingham palace. the Pitch Lake is still being quarried today on a relatively small scale but the ecological impacts of this activity arent well understood yet
happy #WorldWetlandsDay !!🐟🐸these photos are all from the same site- the Pitch Lake in Trinidad, the worlds biggest tar pit 🇹🇹. despite how barren the asphalt in the middle here appears, the rainwater pools that form in the cracks are home to genetically unique guppies, + fish, frog and bird species!
Happy #WorldWetlandsDay!
Traditional knowledge has long guided the sustainable use of wetlands. As the Convention on Wetlands marks 55 years, #WorldWetlandsDay2026 calls on us to protect wetlands and honour cultural heritage.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_Mc...
i know academics talk about this issue constantly but now its actually affected ME so we really need to sort this out
is there any way to report a paper for being made up? thought id finally found a relevant "lit review" discussing what id been stuck trying to research all day. went to check the "lit" it had been "reviewing" only to find none of the papers actually existed😠 wasted a good hour there smh
(also from a scientist POV im intrigued to see if these london birds develop any urban adaptations... perhaps a more Morleys-based dietary niche?)
2/2 rewilding in a massive city like london increases access to nature for so many, and also shows we don't need to partition our world into "human" and "nature" but that there's plenty of room for co-habitation if we try!
good news monday !! excited to see london genuinely considered for rewilding efforts. cities arent often thought of as spaces for nature- even people who live here assume all we have is pigeons and foxes, leading to more nature disconnect + less protections for the wildlife we do have. 1/2
I am absolutely thrilled to share my first chapter, published today in @jappliedecology.bsky.social! Results are summarised in the thread below, or you can read it OA here doi.org/10.1111/1365... @ellileadbeater.bsky.social @rhulbiology.bsky.social @uclcber.bsky.social @ucl-pnl.bsky.social 1/7 🧪
New paper out in #ES&T where we show that killifish exposure to crude oil has impacts (on embryo/larval development and transcriptome) that propagate to their offspring and to their grand-offspring. pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....
@acs.org
Darwin + Wallace may not have known what metabolomics are or the what the effects of burning all that coal would be, yet the the same concepts are being used now to understand how species are adapting to a completely different world. which I think is quite cool, in an existential kind of way.
great symposium yesterday at the @linneansociety.bsky.social! discussing the importance of evolution under anthropogenic changes in the same place the OGs first pitched the origin of species was pretty cool (not to fangirl)
constantly flipflopping between arguing I do serious science and flexing that a lot of my job is counting bugs and catching fishes🐟 can ecology be serious and also a little bit (very) bootleg at times? 😂
nothing wrong with tangled tape measures and string transects 😂😭 #leafcounterandproud
jogging round uni of reading campus this morning, had to stop to check out the wildlife -so many butterflies in a patch of long grass left unmown over the summer! just goes to show how something as easy as not cutting the grass can help nature 🌾🦋🌻
Flying over Caroni Swamp on the first leg of our 18hr journey home. After a month of floods, sweat and (occasional) tears this years field season is at an end 😢 But the experiences we've had, wildlife we've seen and people we've met have made this trip truly unforgettable 💙🏝️🐟 Thank you Trinidad!!!
halfway through fieldwork already! time flies when you're catching smallfry🐟🐟🐟 guppy gang in the pitch lake + surrounding waterways catching fish and exploring the gooeylogical features of the largest asphalt lake in the world
I'm pretty sure I picked up that poncho in 2015 at an open day... never envisioned it's first use would be in a mangrove swamp 10 years later 😂
repping RHUL at caroni swamp 🇹🇹🦩🐊 spectacled caiman, flamingos, scarlet ibis and silky anteaters ... it's not only guppies on this field trip!
