ECR Spotlight is a series of interviews with early-career authors from a selection of papers published in Journal of Experimental Biology and aims to promote not only the diversity of early-career researchers (ECRs) working in experimental biology during our centenary year, but also the huge variety of animals and physiological systems that are essential for the ‘comparative’ approach. Ian Bouyoucos is an author on ‘ Physiological responses to acute warming at the agitation temperature in a temperate shark’, published in JEB. Ian is a postdoc in the lab of Gary Anderson at Department of Biological Sciences, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada, investigating stress physiology of fishes, with a specific interest in functional evolution and applications to conservation.
Ian Bouyoucos
Describe your scientific journey and your current research focus
I have always wanted to be a research scientist. My great grandfather was a soil scientist (with an eponymous soil moisture meter) and my grandfather was a hydroacoustic physicist, but, thanks to the film ‘Jaws’, I became enamoured with marine biology. Through a high school program, I found opportunities to work alongside a couple of fisheries biologists who studied ‘cool’ fishes, like sturgeon and sharks. I studied ecology and evolutionary biology at university and interned over a summer at a field research station in Cape Eleuthera (The Bahamas) studying reef shark biology. After graduating, I returned to Cape Eleuthera as a research assistant and then as a master's student, studying physiological and behavioural responses of sharks to fisheries-related stressors. I finished my master's and started a PhD in tropical Queensland and French Polynesia, where I again studied reef sharks, but with an emphasis on ecophysiology in the context of climate change. In 2020 I defended my PhD and left the tropics to move to sunny Winnipeg, where I′ve been working as a postdoc studying conservation aquaculture of sturgeon while continuing research in shark stress/eco/conservation physiology.
How would you explain the main finding of your paper to a member of the public?
Like all animals, fish can overheat. When fish begin to overheat, they become agitated and need to find a place to cool down. Changes in a fish's physiology can act like a trigger for this behaviour, but we don't know what those changes are. We found that when dogfish sharks begin to overheat and get agitated, their heart rate maxes out, they begin breathing heavily, and critical organs like their brain and heart begin showing signs of stress.
What are the potential implications of this finding for your field of research, and is there anything that you learned during this study that you wish you had known sooner?
The agitation temperature is a newly defined thermal tolerance endpoint for fishes, and this study provides a first account of putative underlying mechanisms. I think that this study has implications for how the agitation temperature will be interpreted in future studies of thermal tolerance, particularly with relevance to climate change. Indeed, one of the critiques of the critical thermal maximum metric in experimental biology is that underlying mechanism are not clearly defined. One thing I wish I had known while designing the study was that the agitation temperature would interfere with measurement of blood pressure in cannulated sharks!
Which part of this research project was the most rewarding/challenging?
Prior to this project, I had been trained in cannulating sharks for blood sampling/pressure measurement and quantifying thermal tolerance, but not in doing both simultaneously; merging those skills was the most challenging and rewarding aspect of the project.
Are there any important historical papers from your field that have been published in JEB?
A lot of great papers on exercise metabolism in fish have been published in JEB, and I think Wood's 1991 paper ‘Acid–base and ion balance, metabolism, and their interactions, after exhaustive exercise in fish’ (doi:10.1242/jeb.160.1.285) is an excellent synthesis of that work. From my area of interest, I think that this paper summarises most of what we still know about the metabolic fate of lactate in fishes. This is a question that I've seen come up again recently in the literature, but without much progress being made since the 90's, I think this is a fruitful area for future research.
A Pacific spiny dogfish (Squalus suckleyi) freely swimming in its holding tank between thermal tolerance trials.
Are there any modern-day JEB papers that you think will be the classic papers of 2123?
I became aware of a preprint version of Seibel and Deutsch's paper from 2020 ‘Oxygen supply capacity in animals evolves to meet maximum demand at the current oxygen partial pressure regardless of size or temperature’ (doi:10.1242/jeb.210492) toward the end of my time as a PhD student and it completely changed the way I understood the concepts of aerobic scope and oxygen supply capacity. In particular, I think this paper has been important for outlining the physiology behind the authors' ‘metabolic index’, which has proven useful in defining aquatic ectotherms' biogeographic limits and predicting the effects of aquatic warming and deoxygenation on those limits. As such, I think this will be an important paper for integrating physiology with future global change biology research.
What do you think experimental biology will look like 50 years from now?
Regarding approaches used in experimental biology, I think -omics technologies will become cheaper and more accessible, and that ‘big data’ analyses will become more the norm. I also think that the proliferation of those techniques will be met with a push to preserve classical approaches in physiology and experimental biology that I think will continue to be foundational in our understanding and interpretation of ‘big data’ science. Regarding the field itself, I am hopeful that efforts made today to eliminate barriers to diversity in STEM fields will make experimental biology an even more inclusive and diverse community.
If you had unlimited funding, what question in your research field would you most like to address?
The biosynthetic pathway of the predominant corticosteroid in sharks and their relatives is completely unknown, which is a hindrance to the endocrinology of stress in these fishes. If I could allocate infinite funds toward ‘mapping’ the hypothalamus–pituitary–interrenal axis in these fishes, I would make a career out of studying stress in phylogenetically ancient fishes to understand the functional evolution of stress.
What changes do you think could improve the lives of early-career researchers, and what would make you want to continue in a research career?
I think that there is a lot that could be changed to improve the lives particularly of postdocs, but I'll just focus on one issue here. I feel there is a mismatch between the windows of opportunity for postdoc funding and the number of years of postdoc training that is expected to be competitive for tenure-track positions. I am entering my fourth year as a postdoc, and am aware that in many cases I am ineligible for independent postdoc funding and need to find an academic job soon!
What's next for you?
I am finishing my postdoc with Gary Anderson later this year and starting a postdoc at the University of British Columbia, where I'll be working with Colin Brauner, Ben Matthews and Duncan Leitch on salmon aquaculture.
Ian Bouyoucos's contact details: Department of Biological Sciences, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB R3T 2N2, Canada.
E-mail: [email protected]
