The North Pacific humpback whale Megaptera novaeangliae is showing strong recovery from commercial over-exploitation, and is recolonizing traditional feeding areas in Pacific Canadian waters now occupied by shipping lanes ...
Populus is a genus distributed across the northern hemisphere. Poplars (Salicaceae) are subject to stresses in their environment such as herbivory, drought, and fire. These perennial hardwoods produce abundant phenylpropanoid ...
Light regulates many biological processes through light-sensitive proteins called opsins. Opsins are involved in vision, but they are also expressed in extraretinal tissue, where their roles are far less clear. Fish have ...
Red Alder (Alnus rubra) is a native coastal hardwood in British Columbia and has evolved a symbiotic relationship with the nitrogen-fixing actinomycete, Frankia. This research uses δ15N signatures in soils, wood and litter ...
The mammalian central nervous system (CNS) has a high degree of complexity and cell type diversity that enables sophisticated processing of sensory information, circuit formation, and behaviour. While much is known about ...
Cumulative effects from multiple anthropogenic stressors over the past three centuries have severely impacted estuarine and coastal habitats, with cascading effects on the species that rely upon them. Pacific salmon ...
Secondary metabolites play important roles in tree defense. Proanthocyanidins (PAs), one of the most common secondary metabolites, are widely distributed in trees and woody plants, and are abundant in poplar. In my research, ...
Contiguous macroscopic charcoal analyses were performed on a 9.03 m long lake sediment core from Roe Lake on Pender Island in the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve of British Columbia, Canada to reconstruct the island’s ...
Cultivation of marine ecosystems began in the early Holocene and has contributed vital resources to humans over millennia. Several more recent cultivation practices, however, erode biodiversity. Emerging lines of evidence ...
Global biodiversity losses are being driven by human actions, and coral reef communities are not immune. Local anthropogenic stress and global climate change are rapidly changing coral reefs, through coral bleaching and ...
Wolbachia is a maternally inherited, endosymbiotic bacterium that infects at least 40% of terrestrial arthropods. As a facultative symbiont in the majority of its hosts, Wolbachia commonly act as a reproductive parasite; ...
Selfish genetic elements break the rules of Mendelian inheritance to bias their
transmission to following generations, often with negative fitness consequences. A striking
example involves selfish X chromosomes that ...
Behavioural asymmetry (laterality) is widespread among conspicuously bilaterally symmetrical organisms, playing a part in many aspects of life history from reproduction to feeding. Laterality is typically thought to occur ...
Microplastic particles (MPs) are widely distributed in aquatic environments and present a potential risk to marine life. This thesis considers several issues relating to methodologies for sampling and analyzing MPs and the ...
Hermatypic, or reef-building, corals (Order Scleractinia) are the foundation of coral reefs, providing a diversity of structurally complex habitats for the myriad species in these biologically diverse ecosystems. However, ...
Learning about marine ecosystems is challenging; organisms move, abiotic conditions change, underwater environments are difficult to sample, and in BC, the coastline is lengthy and largely remote. This thesis explores two ...
Neuronal communication in the mammalian brain relies on the presynaptic release of neurotransmitters which bind to ligand-gated ion channels found on postsynaptic neurons to modulate neuronal excitability. One such ...
The threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) is an important model for studying evolution. Sticklebacks are widely distributed in the northern hemisphere and inhabit freshwater, brackish, and marine waters. Anadromous ...
Coral reefs around the world are threatened by a variety of sources, from localized impacts, including overfishing and coastal development, to global temperature increases and ocean acidification. Conserving these marine ...
The bathypelagic copepods Spinocalanus brevicaudatus, Scaphocalanus brevicornis and Heterorhabdus tanneri have established relatively large, permanent breeding populations in Bute and Jervis Inlet, British Columbia. They ...