Open Master projects with EvoFish

We are thrilled to welcome new students to our group.

In our group we work on ecology and evolution with application to fisheries and aquaculture. We are interested in:

• how fishing affects life history and behaviour exploited populations and its consequences for stock recovery
• how 
• how the environment affect fish behaviour and cognition and its implications for aquaculture
• evolution of parasites, particularly of salmon louse

Our model species include guppy, daphnids, salmon lice, salmon and gobies and we work with experiments, modelling and biostatistics.

You can see some potential Master projects underneath but we are also happy to hear your ideas.

If you wonder what are your career options after a Master thesis in our group, you can check here what former Master students and PhD students are doing after graduating.

Behaviour and life history in the guppy Poecilia reticulata:

• Effects of selective fishing on fish behaviour, supervision by Beatriz Diaz Pauli and Mikko Heino.

We want to find out whether fishing selects certain behaviours from the population, leaving others behind, and what are the consequences for the population.

• Can fishing affect fish cognition?, supervision by Beatriz Diaz Pauli and Mikko Heino.        

We want to know whether selective fishing affects to cognitive ability of fish. Have fishes adapted to high fishing mortality (i.e., maturing early and with higher fecundity) worse cognition abilities?

• Effect of oxygen of guppy behaviour, supervision by Beatriz Diaz Pauli and Mikko Heino.     

Juvenile development under different oxygen concentrations leads to changes in life history traits (maturation and growth). We want to test whether oxygen concentrations affects also fish behaviour.

• Effect of fishing on reproductive behaviour in male guppies, supervision by Beatriz Diaz Pauli, Anne Christine Utne Palm, and Mikko Heino.

Selective removal of bigger fish leads to life history changes in the population. Are those changes in size also affecting the reproductive strategy of males?

Modelling genetic interactions between escaped farmed salmon and their wild conspecifics

• Modelling genetic interactions between farmed escapees and wild conspecifics, supervision by Mikko Heino and Kevin Glover.

Life history and evolutionary ecology of the goby Sufflogobius bibarbatus in the  Benguela ecosystem off Namibia:

• Search for the molecular "trick" to survive in the sea with little oxygen in Benguela, supervision by Anne Gro Vea Salvanes and Anders Goksoyr

Cod, evolution and bioeconomics:

• The cost of evolution – what value is lost when fish evolve to smaller sizes, and how does this affect optimal harvest strategies?, supervision by Fabian Zimmermann and Mikko Heino

Population ecology of North Sea fish stocks: (temporarily unavailable)

• Changes in growth and distribution of North Sea saithe, two Master projects, supervision by Jennifer Devine and Irene Huse:

1. Determine if change in saithe growth may be driven by changes in prey abundance
2. Determine if the distribution of saithe has changed over time and if observed changes are related to spatio-temporal changes in prey abundance