I'm a fish immunologist so that means I look at how fish resist diseases and the mechanisms within their bodies that do that. There's many several very different aspects to this.
One is the basic biology aspect fish have almost the same immune system we have we have they have antibodies they have a cells that you up bacteria however the way that they use those no those cells, the way that they use the molecules involved is very different they're regulated very differently because sufficient live in a wide range of temperatures so this is very interesting implications for the evolution new evolution thing in system and understanding how it works and how our mean system.
The second part is aquaculture because aquaculture is something we're gonna have to figure out. When you want to eat fish aquaculture is the only way producing fish that's growing. So a lot of it involves figuring out how fish in aquaculture situations get sick, how we can develop methods to make them not get sick and keep them healthy so we can grow them for food production without destroying the environment.
And then thirdly the environment is a very important factor too, so I work a lot on wild populations a fish. Currently I’m working on arctic charr. They live in lakes sometimes that are only two or three degrees Celsius. They live and reproduce at those temperatures. Climate change is gonna make those lakes up in the High Arctic change by two or three or four degrees. That's a huge change for these fish. Populations are gonna shift. Populations are gonna die. So I have to understand the population biology and how the immune system works at that temperature in order predict or understand the effects that are gonna happen when the temperature changes. So climate change is a big part of it too.
The best part about working at Waterloo is Waterloo is about water. So we have a water Institute. We have a Canadian water network here. We have a lot of researchers working in water and on environmental chemicals, on the things that I'm interested in. So the best things about here is it's how connected I am to other people in my field and it's very easy to develop projects, to work together, to synergize our efforts to find bigger and better answers.
So, this is basically the aquatic facility where we hold our fish. This is that the tanks where we keep our fish before we do experiments with them. We have rooms upstairs where we'd be doing experiments with them and those experiments go on for variously months or weeks. Here we keep the fish, we feed them and occasionally we will take them out and take a blood sample from them and then put them back in here. Just because we use the blood, the immune system cells from the blood and that’s the easiest access we can get.
I'm just catching some fish. I'm gonna put them in a mild anesthetic. This mostly numbs their muscles and stops them from splashing around and kicking while we're trying to handle them. Typically we do this as also it numbs them so that we can you can take a blood sample from them. It's like an anesthetic as well. It just takes a few seconds for them to get the anesthetic and you can tell that they're getting it because they start turning upside down because their muscles don’t work and they cam’t regulate themselves in the water very well.
So this is a rainbow trout. It is very typical model system in my lab because they're important for aquaculture. A lot of aquaculture is done with Atlantic salmon, but we don't live beside the ocean here in Waterloo so I can’t culture salmon.
We would take them over her. We would lay them on the table and then if we were going to take a blood sample, we would normally, actually, very interestingly take the blood from the tail. Just below the spine there's a big cavity. Where the blood pools and you can just stick a needle in and pull it out, collect the blood with almost no pain to them and then you just put them back in the water. See the anesthetics are going to wear off soon, so I'm gonna put him back in the tank.
Advice for students: Really love what you doing! I did it because I really love biology and that's the only way you gonna get through. If you really want to be a researcher, if you want to study biology and get through grad school it's going to take a lot of hard work. You have to really love what you doing. Find something that excites you. Really, really you’ve GOT to know the answer. You can't sleep at night until you know the answer. Find someone who's doing that, who is just as passionate as you and work with them. It’s the best advice I can give you.