Miss Skia Basdag
PhD Student

Research area(s)

Title: Understanding the response of aquatic micro-organisms to environmental change through the lens of energy allocation

My work combines key concepts like the metabolic theory of ecology and the temperature-size rule to model changes in organismal biology and predict large-scale shifts in microscopic communities. Using a novel energy budget model allows me to partition the limited energy an organism acquires from its environment and track how that allocation shifts as conditions change. This inevitably helps to track the trade-offs that lead to the observed stress responses. Rather than treating the response as a single measurable outcome, this allows us to answer where the energy comes from, and what trade-offs are being made between growth, feeding, maintenance, and activity as conditions change and organisms adapt.  I use protists as model organisms to test this model, specifically the ciliate Tetrahymena pyriformis, and experimentally manipulate novel environmental conditions and expose them to stressors like warming and pesticides such as imidacloprid and glyphosate.

Research Interests

I am interested in how aquatic organisms are adapting to anthropogenic stressors and how this affects community-level processes. My broader research interests include environmental monitoring using novel technologies, citizen science initiatives, community dynamics and food-web networks.