March 4th, 2021
Zoomester studyblr challenge
Day 4: For my researching fellows, what are you researching on? If you’re not currently researching, what is the topic within your field that you’re most passionate about?
Well, I'm not doing any research rn BUT I was until last october. My research project aimed to monitor marine bioindicators of human impacts and/or climate change.
So lemme tell you about my precious worms.
They're actually Polychaetes, the equivalent of worms but in the sea. So yeah, they live in the sand, at the bottom of water bodies, are part of the basis of the food chain, and are a kind of a biological elevator: carrying water and oxygen to the sediment layers; and nutrients from the sediment to the water.
Ok. But think with me, if they carry such important functions in their ecosystem then, if something bad happens to them, the whole thing would be affected, right? Imagine, for instance, the damage if Polychaetes, wich are the food of crabs and fishes (= OUR FOOD), get contamined!? We'd also be contamined, right? And, further, it could also cause economic damage to some sectors of the market.
So, let's keep thinking. Say we have some toxic substance in a marine environment. As Polychaetes usually don't move around that much, they'd be affected by these contaminants many times, both through water AND sand. So, we could use them to identify that something bad is happening since the beginning of the contamination, and then we'd be able to prevent the fish (and us) from becoming contaminated.
That is to say: Polychaetes are great to indicate if there's some environmental impact in a marine system. But not just that, they're just as great to indicate WHAT KIND of impact it is, since their stress response (mortality, increased abundance, changes in its life cycle...) is different for each type of pollution.
ie, Polychaetes rules
But to know for sure that the response we're getting from them is actually because of an environmental impact, we need to know how they respond the natural changes - such as variation on temperature, rainfall, salinity - that happen along with the changing of the seasons. And that's what my research project aims, we're creating a database of the response of Polychaetes to natural changes, so we'd have something to compare with when we encounter an incident of pollution in the marine environment.
