November news update

I can’t believe another year is coming to an end. Our Honours students, Jackson and Nina, have submitted their theses and now it’s just a matter of them giving their final seminars and having the thesis defence. We are looking forward to a new group starting next year.

John Morrongiello and his PhD student Josh Barrow visited the University of Adelaide recently to discuss all things otoliths. They spent time discussing growth chronology projects being undertaken by several PhD students here. For those interested in biochronologies which are often analysed by mixed effects modelling check out the following for an awesome introduction.

Bronwyn presented one of the research talks at the Sustainable Economic Growth for Regional Australia (SEGRA) conference research day at Whyalla in Upper Spencer Gulf. Her presentation focused on the Spencer Gulf Ecosystem Development Initiative. Prior to the research talks we visited Muradel, a microalgae company originally planning on biofuel production, but now looking at diversifying.

Check out our new paper available via this link – the paper titled Ecological performance of construction materials subject to ocean climate change focuses on how artificial structures, which are increasingly used to protect coastal infrastructure, may chemically react with changing seawater conditions, and affect associated biota.

Our annual School of Biological Sciences research day was held late October. Alice gave one of the 5 min talks on our coastal carbon research. Giving a 5 min talk to a broad audience is somewhat challenging but she did a great job initially talking about what coastal carbon actually is, before discussing some of the specific objectives of the project. This was made easier by some great images from our field work so far. We also welcomed Pere Masque, from Edith Cowan University, to give one of the Sprigg Geobiology seminars at the University. Pere is involved in dating of sediment cores for the coastal carbon project.

We farewelled Zhengiang Ye from the Ocean University of China, Qingdao who was visiting us for the past year. We are continuing to work on a paper looking at connectivity between spawning areas and mixed wintering stocks of small yellow croaker along the Chinese coast.

The image shows some amazing otolith ear rings!