7 minute read
IN CONVERSATION WITH KIM BIRNIE-GAUVIN
CAROLINE WOOD, IN CONVERSATION WITH...
KIM BIRNIEGAUVIN
Top right Kim releasing an Atlantic bluefin tuna after tagging and sampling in Skagerrak Photo credit Kristi Källo
Right Kim with a male sockeye salmon on the spawning grounds, as she looks for radio-tagged fish Photo credit Kendra Robinson
Below Kim with a feisty sea trout about to be released after being tagged and sampled Photo credit Andreas Svarer
How do you introduce yourself?
I’m a conservation physiologist and ecologist, with a special appreciation for freshwater species.
When did you become interested in studying aquatic organisms?
As a child growing up in Quebec, Canada, I was completely engrossed in animals and was always outside catching tadpoles, swimming with turtles, going fishing, and so on. I have a particular memory of being obsessed with the walrus in the film 50 First Dates – I watched that scene over and over again!
But I also had this huge drive to ‘change the world’ somehow, and absorbed the conventional idea that the best way would be to become a doctor. I was actually on the point of taking the medical school entrance exams, but then had an epiphany. I didn’t want to commit to studying one subject for the next 13 years and completely cut myself off from nature. The climate and biodiversity crises had made it clear that there are other ways to make a difference. So I applied to study a Masters in Aquatic Ecology. When I told my mum, she wasn’t that surprised. She said, ‘You loved that walrus so much!’
How did you decide on your Master’s project?
I was initially attracted to Steven Cooke’s lab at Carleton University, because they had done some work on lemon sharks. I admit I had visions of myself swimming with sharks in Florida or the Bahamas… Instead, I found myself doing field studies with brown trout at the Technical University of Denmark. So instead of tropical seas, I was thrust into the Scandinavian winter! But I consider it a bit of a blessing now, because I’m still here.
Why are freshwater systems so important?
Freshwater makes up less than 2.5% of the world’s water yet 140,000 species (including 55% of all fish species) depend on it to survive. Despite this, conservation efforts tend to focus much more on marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Freshwater ecosystems are the most threatened ecosystems in the world, and species not yet discovered will likely go extinct before we even know they exist.
So what were you doing with brown trout in Denmark?
My thesis topic was the role of oxidative processes (particularly antioxidant responses) in enabling individuals to survive migration.1 Brown trout is a ‘partial migrant’: some populations migrate from freshwater to seawater as juveniles, while others remain in freshwater systems for all their lives. Migrating fish undergo a vast array of morphological, behavioural and physiological processes but it was unknown whether their oxidative responses also differed, compared with the non-migrating phenotype. For the first time, we produced evidence that migrating fish accumulate antioxidants.2 This makes sense when you consider that migration is very energetically demanding, and generates a lot of oxidative stress.
Your next step was to apply for a PhD at the Technical University of Denmark: you must have enjoyed the work there, despite there being no sharks involved?
Definitely. The department, the National Institute of Aquatic Resources, is one of the best places in the world to do fish-related research. They have a huge portfolio of projects covering just about every species in the book. Denmark is also a little unconventional in that research projects tend to be collaborations involving lots of different principal investigators, rather than being headed by a single lab with one supervisor overseeing everything. It means that you end up being involved in lots of projects simultaneously, helping out other people who might be working on very different topics.
What did your PhD focus on?
I was investigating how barriers to migration affect brown trout and Atlantic salmon across their entire lifecycle, not just during migration.
My main finding was that barriers such as dams and weirs have a huge impact on fish across their whole life, particularly through altering habitats.3 For instance, putting in a dam may cause silt to accumulate upstream, so that the habitat is no longer suitable for spawning or early development. Apparent solutions such as fish passages and ladders don’t address all these issues, meaning that barrier removal is the only effective option.
What happened next?
After a few postdoctoral projects, I was really fortunate to be awarded a prestigious three-year Villum International Postdoc. Not only does this give me financial security, it also includes a requirement to undertake fieldwork abroad. So I joined Erika Eliason’s lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studying the impacts of climate change on Pacific salmon. This involved using telemetry tags that record acceleration to evaluate how hard the fish are having to work under conditions of increased flow or elevated temperatures in the Fraser River, British Colombia.
What are you currently working on?
I’m still continuing the work I did with Erika, particularly looking at climate change impacts on fish physiology and ecology. And, increasingly, I’m drawing on all the skills I have learnt so far to work out how we can design experiments to make them more ecologically relevant. When we study fish in a laboratory setting, we strip away many of the factors they would naturally encounter, such as the presence of predators, fluctuating food availability, varying water quality, etc. We need be sure that the way fish respond in our experiments is really representative of how they would in nature.
Do you feel settled in Denmark?
I would say yes – I love the freedom and flexibility I have here. I get to work on all sorts of species, and do both applied and experimental work. For instance, I’m involved in a really cool project studying a population of Bluefin tuna in the seas around Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The population completely disappeared in the 1960s due to overfishing and a complete collapse of the species, but then returned in 2015. About a thousand volunteer anglers catch these tuna for us, so we can take physiological samples and tag them. By working out where they go, how they respond to capture and what physiological factors might affect their survival, hopefully we can help secure this stock for the future. It’s also great fun to go from tagging a 15 gram trout to handling a 300 kilo tuna!
What is the most challenging part of your work?
It’s very dispiriting when, despite the research evidence we generate, policymakers still disregard freshwater systems. So I’ve been trying to contribute to outreach efforts, for instance giving talks for Dam Removal Europe and to local angling groups.
I’m also acutely aware of how difficult it can be for early-career researchers to achieve enough financial security to keep going in academia.
To try and improve the situation, I’m involved with the SEB, to feed in my ideas about what the Society can do on a practical level to help. It’s great to see lots of new initiatives, such as the workshops on grant writing and how to host a small meeting.
What do you do to relax?
Apart from walking my rescue dog (the best thing in my world!), I love photographing wildlife and foraging for mushrooms. I suppose they both require similar skills to catching fish, mainly a great deal of patience and being prepared to get cold and wet sometimes. But similarly, the results make it totally worthwhile.
Learn more about Kim’s research at https://www.kimbirniegauvin.com/
References:
1. Birnie-Gauvin K. Oxidative Ecology of Wild Fish: Investigating the Effects of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Factors on Oxidative
Stress and Its Link to Life-Histories. Masters dissertation.
Ottawa, Carleton University, 2017. 2. Birnie-Gauvin K, Peiman KS, Larsen MH, et al. Oxidative stress and partial migration in brown trout (Salmo trutta). Can J
Zoology 2017; 95: 829–835. 3. Birnie-Gauvin K. The Unspoken Truth About Impacted Rivers:
Consequences and Implications of Barriers for Conservation of Freshwater Fish. Doctoral dissertation. Kongens Lyngby,
Technical University of Denmark, 2020.
