by Dan Rubinstein
As a girl growing up in West Vancouver’s Caulfield Cove, pinched between mountains and the ocean, Jacqueline Chapman developed a deep interest in nature and conservation.
A job as a Fisheries and Oceans Canada technician in Winnipeg during her undergraduate degree in biology focused her attention on fisheries research and introduced the possibility of grad school.
And an opportunity to work with Prof. Steven Cooke, a Canada Research Chair in Environmental Science and Biology, drew her to Carleton.
Human impact on fish populations
“People have many interrelated impacts on the health of fish populations,” says Chapman, whose did a master’s on the effects of watershed land-use on stream fish with Cooke and is now working on a PhD exploring interactions between catch and release fisheries and disease in migrating salmon across Canada.
“Research is helping us understand these issues in a more holistic way. We need to look at not only a single factor but also multiple factors to get a better perspective on what’s really happening out there.”
Chapman, who was recently awarded the Canadian Society of Zoologists’ Leo Margolis Award for excellence in fisheries research, has already done PhD fieldwork on the Fraser River near Chilliwack, B.C., and on the Arctic Ocean near Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. Now, on the cusp of the United Nations’ World Oceans Day (June 8), she’s off to the Atlantic shoreline north of Gander, N.L., to help complete the picture.
Changing our practices for the sake of conservation
Essentially, Chapman is looking into how fish health and physiological stresses such as being handled by people affect the post-release survival rates of several species of salmon during their spawning migrations. Even being taken out of the water and handled for a few seconds can impact a fish’s energy expenditure and damage its protective mucus coat, potentially impacting its ability to spawn. It may swim away and appear to be OK, but it could be more vulnerable to pathogens and experience a phenomenon called post-release mortality.
Fisheries managers must estimate, for example, whether the practice of harvesting sockeye on the Fraser River while catching and releasing migrating coho on the same stretches of water is impacting the annual population increase of the latter species. Chapman’s work aims to incorporate disease into these estimates to strengthen the current understanding of what factors influence whether a fish will survive and successfully spawn post-release.
By using rod-and-reel and dip-netting to catch and analyze fish in three far-flung arenas, an uncommonly wide geographical approach supported by the Ocean Tracking Network in collaboration with Fisheries and Oceans Canada and other partners, Chapman hopes to be able to connect details on nearly four dozen different pathogens to a big-picture perspective on fish population health.
“Her research does a great job of walking the line between fundamental and applied work,” says Cooke, praising Chapman’s independence, motivation and leadership.
Guiding early career researchers
Last year, Chapman was the lead author on a paper called “Being relevant: Practical guidance for early career researchers interested in solving conservation problems.”
“In a human-altered world where biodiversity is in decline and conservation problems abound, there is a dire need to ensure that the next generation of conservation scientists have the knowledge, skills, and training to address these problems,” the abstract declares. The paper identifies 13 practical strategies that early career researchers can use, including thinking “big picture” during conservation projects and maintaining positive relationships with locals while doing fieldwork.
“Not only has she figured out how to do high-quality research,” Cooke says about Chapman, “she also wants to share these ideas with other young scientists.”
Several of those scientists work in Cooke’s lab and are part of a growing community of researchers at Carleton whose work revolves around either saltwater or freshwater ecology and policy.
From Cooke’s interest in fish ecology and conservation physiology to geographer and environmental scientist Jesse Vermaire’s research into how land-use and climate change are impacting freshwater ecosystems, from Canada Research Chair in Wastewater Treatment Engineering Banu Örmeci’s work to develop new technologies to clear pathogens and contaminants from municipal wastewater to the recent creation of the $4-million Jarislowsky Chair in Water and Global Health that will make significant contributions to the critical challenges of water and public health, Carleton has been expanding this portfolio over the past decade.
“It’s an area of strength for Carleton,” says Cooke, “and we’re still building.”