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 but also the huge variety of animals and physiological systems that are essential for the ‘comparative’ approach. Caroline Terry is an author on ‘ Interactive effects of temperature and salinity on metabolism and activity of the copepod Tigriopus californicus’, published in JEB. Caroline is a PhD candidate in the lab of Wes Dowd at the School of Biological Sciences, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA, investigating the mechanisms underlying unpredictable multi-stressor interactions.
Caroline Terry
How did you become interested in biology?
Growing up, I always had a love for nature and a strong sense of curiosity. In school, I found that I was most curious about scientific subjects, and in college, thanks to some passionate instructors, this curiosity started to become focused on biology and the incredible variation in the biological world. Among living organisms, you can find an exception to almost any rule and a solution to almost any problem, and that amazes me. It also excites me to consider how much there is yet to learn in this field; there are always more questions to ask and more things to learn, and pursuing these answers can have great impacts on the way we see and treat our planet and those living on it.
Describe your scientific journey and your current research focus
For most of my undergraduate experience, I was under the impression that there were very limited career opportunities in STEM outside of medical and veterinary tracks. I was volunteering as an undergraduate researcher in an animal behavior lab at the time, and once in a conversation with my advisor I mentioned how much I enjoyed the research and wished I could keep doing something like this beyond college. That's when I learned that scientific research can indeed be a career path all on its own and I immediately pivoted my future goals to graduate school. I was lucky to end up in Dr Wes Dowd's marine environmental physiology lab and quickly found that I deeply enjoyed the mechanistic approach of physiological research.
How would you explain the main message of your paper to a member of the public?
Not only does climate change cause increased temperatures, but it also leads to changes in other important aspects of an environment. For example, in marine environments, oceans are not only heating up, but also becoming more acidic, holding less oxygen, and more. Although animals in the wild must deal with changes in all these conditions at the same time, in scientific research we often study animal responses to changes in only one such condition at a time (also called single-stressor studies). Findings from these single-stressor studies are sometimes later used to predict responses to climate change or prioritize conservation efforts, but the problem is that animals in natural environments are facing multiple stressors, or changes in multiple conditions. So, the science we are using to make these important decisions isn't necessarily representative of natural environments, and as such we may not be making the most accurate predictions or effective conservation choices. My research is one of many other projects that supports the idea that findings from single-stressor studies cannot simply be combined with one another to predict responses to multiple stressors, but that instead we need multiple-stressor studies to get the most natural results. It also highlights the need to understand why findings from multiple-stressor studies are often so different from combined results of single-stressor studies.
What do you enjoy most about research, and why?
I enjoy how surprising research can be. I am always learning and finding results that surprise me or are the opposite of what I expect. Research is super neat because not finding what you expected can sometimes be just as or even more exciting than finding what you expected. There are always more questions to be answered, and it is incredibly satisfying to me to try and piece together various lines of research, approaches and findings to tell an interesting and convincing story.
What is the hardest challenge you have faced in the course of your research and how did you overcome it?
I have found working with such tiny organisms to present a surprising amount of difficulty. The species of copepod I study, Tigriopus californicus, is only 1–2 mm long and weighs around 30 µg when wet. This size can be convenient in some ways, but it also makes them easy to lose track of, they often require alterations of established protocol to work with such small amounts of biomass, and they are virtually impossible to keep still, even in the tiniest drops of water. I spent several weeks in the beginning of graduate school (unsuccessfully) attempting to glue dog hairs to the backs of copepods to prevent them from moving! We have yet to find an effective way to prevent copepods from swimming that doesn't also affect their physiology, but we do our best to work with this aspect of copepod research, as evidenced in our recent publication.
Caroline Terry’s contact details: School of Biological Sciences, Washington State University, PO Box 644236, Pullman, WA 99164-4236, USA.
E-mail: [email protected]
