Parasites often have devastating impacts on their host, including increased mortality, behavioral modifications, sterility, and death. These effects on individuals have consequences for population and ecosystem dynamics
Copepods are vital in pelagic ecosystems and central in pelagic food webs where they act as a trophic link between primary producers and larger carnivores. Despite that both copepods and parasites are considered important by themselves, parasites of copepods are not well studied. In this project, you will investigate the parasites of pelagic copepods through experiments and behavioral analysis.
Students will interact within our RCN project POICE which focuses on the effects of copepod parasites. Within this framework we can offer projects on for example
- Fine-scale spatiotemporal dynamics of copepods & their parasites
- Swimming behavior of infected & uninfected copepods
- Establishment of host-parasite-model system to examine modifications related to fitness
