About the project
Tropical predators are becoming established within temperate communities as a response to climate warming (tropicalisation), but with unknown consequences. This project will use an interdisciplinary approach to understand the eco-evolutionary impacts of altered predator-prey interactions of marine species and communities undergoing tropicalisation while helping to inform management strategies.
Predation is a primary driver of how species function and evolve over space and time. With modern climate change, however, voracious predators from tropical marine regions are becoming established within temperate communities (part of a phenomenon known as ‘tropicalisation’). Yet the eco-evolutionary impacts of tropical predators preying on temperate species have not been studied empirically, leaving us with only theoretical predictions as a rough guide.
The aim of this PhD is to provide a broad understanding the eco-evolutionary consequences of altered predator-prey interactions under modern tropicalisation. The project will focus on the rocky shore of the Baja peninsula (Mexico). Here, multiple tropical gastropod (snails) predators have established populations in temperate communities.
You will conduct ecological studies at local and regional scales (e.g., photo-quadrat monitoring, biodiversity surveys, predator-exclusion experiments) to establish whether tropical predators are having negative impacts on the ecology and life history temperate prey. Analysis of museum specimens and literature will be used to test whether tropical predators have different functional and morphological traits compared to temperate predators.
The project will also test hypotheses on potential co-evolutionary adaptations to tropicalisation using a recently established study system where a temperate barnacle and tropical snail predator both alter their morphologies where they co-occur. Genomic and morphological analyses will be conducted to test whether these are phenotypically plastic responses or an evolutionary adaptation.
The results of this project will be highly impactful and serve as a valuable case study on a growing issue in marine conservation biology, the impacts of tropicalisation.
You will also be supervised by organisations other than the University of Southampton, including Dr Suzanne Williams from the Natural History Museum.
