We study physiology and behaviour to address questions about how fish work and how they deal with environmental challenges such as low oxygen (hypoxia), high temperature, and freshwater acidification. Stress and effects of the glucocorticoid stress hormone, cortisol, are key themes running through our research.

In current projects, we are using dominance hierarchies to study how the stress axis functions during prolonged stress. Prolonged elevation of cortisol lowers thermal tolerance in adult fish and when experienced during early development, lowers thermal tolerance later in life - we are working to identify the mechanisms responsible for these effects. We are also studying individual variation in hypoxia tolerance to determine the relative contributions of physiology (e.g. gill morphology) and behaviour (e.g. use of aquatic surface respiration). Finally, we are using zebrafish lines lacking the serotonin transporter (Sert) to study the roles of serotonin in stress and anxiety-related behaviour, digestive physiology and metabolism, and cardiorespiratory responses to hypoxia.

For an up-to-date publication list, please see Google Scholar.