New NIWA post-doc studies ocean acidification
A new post doctoral fellow at NIWA – Dr Claire Guy – is investigating the ecological impacts of ocean acidification on key Antarctic shellfish.
Ocean acidification is one of the pressing threats to the world’s oceans. It’s expected to affect the cold waters of the Antarctic decades before the rest of the world. But just what this threat might mean is largely unknown.
Ocean acidification has the potential to affect the basic life functions of key species, such as shellfish, and change ecosystems. Claire’s aim is to develop ecologically relevant models of consequences to key shellfish species and their wider ecosystems.
Claire will be using the extensive information gathered by NIWA’s marine ecology programme, IceCUBE, on the habitats and organisms of the coastal Ross Sea. She’ll also be using new knowledge from recently completed laboratory experiments investigating how key Antarctic shellfish species cope (or not!) with changes in ocean acidity.
Claire is a recent graduate of Queen’s University (Belfast, Northern Ireland) and has expertise in the population ecology of native and invasive oysters. Claire’s post doc is funded by Air New Zealand and NIWA, in collaboration with Antarctica New Zealand and WWF-New Zealand.
Contact: Dr Claire Guy
Read more about NIWA's work on Antarctic shellfish.
Also our IceCUBE project - research into Coastal Underwater Benthic Ecosystems.
Royal Society Emerging Issues paper on ocean acidification 2009
