This one is also SO IMPORTANT TO ME because it came up a while back when people were complaining about National Science Foundation funding and trying to cut budgets for research. (It was a whole big republican thing, look it up). And one of the examples was “egghhhh, scientists are wasting our money building treadmills for shrimp” with, I guess, the assumption that scientists do things for shits and giggles and to film sweet youtube videos, and that any project funded by a government agency hasn’t gone through an intense screening process to demonstrate scientific & public merit.
Alright, so I haven’t even looked up the paper and I can tell you off the top of my head that treadmills are a great way to measure:
ability to evade predators
which are traits that we very often want to measure in a diversity of organisms.
Here are some important questions you could address with shrimp treadmills:
How is pollution affecting shrimp fitness?
Does X nutrient make shrimps healthier/faster/more active, with consequences for shrimp farming and effects of shrimps on the ecosystem?
How does shrimp activity level correlate with other interesting behaviors (risk-taking, aggression, ) and how are these genetically encoded and linked?
Are faster shrimp more likely to survive/spread into new locations/perform well in shrimp farms or whatever they grow shrimp in?
Okay, so those are just what I brainstormed right now. I don’t actually know what the hot questions in shrimp are.
Now I’ll look up the actual study by Dr. David Scholnik. So:
He spent $50 making his treadmills from scrap parts.
Treadmills allow the measuring of behaviors shrimp don’t normally exhibit in the lab (sans predators, lots of space, etc.).
His ultimate research goal is to increase food safety (this means year to year certainty that human populations will have enough food to eat.) Our aquatic food resources are hella vulnerable right now due to overfishing, pollution, ecosystem disturbances, invasive species, etc.
His study is part of a larger project looking at how shrimp’s immune systems respond to ocean warming and pollution. (a/n: BAM! got it in one)
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