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. Chantelle Penney is an author on ‘ Transcriptomic responses to within-generation and intergenerational environmental warming in a cold-adapted salmonid’, published in JEB. Chantelle conducted the research described in this article while a PhD student in Chris C. Wilson and Gary Burness's lab at Trent University, Canada.
Chantelle Penney
How did you become interested in biology?
I watched Free Willy as a child and was amazed that anything in the ocean (in this case, an orca) could be so intelligent. I then became obsessed with learning more about cetaceans and other ocean critters. So, 7 year old me declared to all the grown-ups that my ambition was to be… a whale trainer. This went on for some time. My mother (bless her patience) having recognized the unwavering curiosity in her mud-bespeckled kid, described to me one day what a biologist does, but I was adamant: I would be a whale trainer. My understanding of what a biologist does changed one day when my mother showed me a documentary on TV of researchers sampling life underwater near a volcanic island and she said to me, ‘This is what marine biologists do’. I have been hooked on biology ever since.
Describe your scientific journey and your current research focus
I began my undergrad wanting to specialize in the ecology of aquatic organisms. The more I learned, the more I questioned why some populations behaved the way they did, and why some responded differently to others. I looked for answers to these questions through the biological levels of organization and found that I was often satisfied with physiological explanations. So, I refined my studies to the field of environmental/eco-physiology of aquatic organisms. My research since has focused on the physiological and behavioural responses of aquatic organisms to environmental changes, energetic trade-offs between physiological systems, and the limits of plasticity and adaptive capacity. I particularly enjoy studying phenotypic plasticity because of its obscurity. Like, plasticity is to biology what gravity is to physics; we know what it is but we don't really know what it is.
Measuring the length of an adult lake trout. This fish received a temperature treatment to test whether its thermal experience would affect its offspring's physiological response to warming.
Measuring the length of an adult lake trout. This fish received a temperature treatment to test whether its thermal experience would affect its offspring's physiological response to warming.
How would you explain the main findings of your paper to a member of the public?
Lake trout are cold-adapted salmonids that are threatened by the warming associated with climate change. For some organisms (especially long-lived ones like the lake trout) adapting to rapidly a warming habitat may be particularly challenging. However, previous studies have suggested that the thermal experiences of parents may bolster the physiological responses of offspring facing similar temperatures, potentially allowing populations to persist in warmer habitats and granting more time for evolutionary processes to occur. This transmission of environmental experiences between generations occurs through the inheritance of factors other than genes (i.e. non-genetic inheritance), but these factors can influence gene expression and thus the physiological response to environmental change. We measured gene expression in lake trout offspring of parents that had experienced different temperatures to examine what effect these thermal experiences had on the offspring's physiological response to warming. We found that parental thermal experiences did influence offspring gene expression, which included some genes that were associated with thermal tolerance and metabolism, but the effect was limited and will not likely allow lake trout populations to successfully cope with warming due to climate change.
Do you have a top tip for others just starting out at your career stage?
I have two tips: (1) take lots of photos of your experiments, study animals and fieldwork. They are useful when presenting your work, for teaching and for community engagement. And (2) try to schedule some time every week or two to keep up with new papers relevant to your research. This is easier said than done, but there are apps and programs out there to help. Email alerts are a good option but I also recommend an app for RSS feeds which many journals still offer.
What do you like to do in your free time?
I enjoy reading. I'm currently working my way through classic fiction novels and some of my favourites so far are by Jules Verne (particularly, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. I also like to pick up broken electronics and tinker with them to try and figure out how they work and to see if I can fix them. And, who knows, maybe someday I'll have a need for my soldering skills in the lab!
Chantelle Penney’s contact details: Environmental and Life Sciences Graduate Program, Trent University, Peterborough, ON, Canada, K9J 7B8.
E-mail: [email protected]
