Dr. Nicholas Payne

MOSAIC will establish an ambitious interregional, multi-purpose marine observation network, linking oceanography to biodiversity, using innovative sensor technologies and tool kits. We will gather policy facing data on protected species and their habitats and produce forward-looking indicators to underpin conservation efforts in an ever-changing ocean.

TUINNIN-IN is a collaborative project aimed at understanding the importance of Atlantic bluefin tuna (ABFT) to Ireland"s marine ecosystems and society, and enhancing the sustainable management of the species into the future. It will take a multidisciplinary approach exploring available- and new data to furnish a variety of predictions and recommendations, and with several main objectives that will benefit the Irish economy and society while simultaneously enhancing ecological knowledge and management outcomes for ABFT in Ireland. TUINNIN-IN will resolve ABFT diet and trophic role using complementary dietary tracers; build distribution models to explain why ABFT abundance varies through space and time and predict how occurrences will shift in the future; adopt ecosystem accounting methods to reveal the broad economic and social benefits of ABFT to Ireland and how they can be maximized; and create a new research network to bring Ireland to the forefront as a leading European hub of tuna research. As well as being a primary research programme, TUINNIN-IN is also a partnership and networking platform, represented by a range of academics and policy advisers, and with a dedicated legacy building work package aimed at building long-term research capacity in Ireland, and to confer self-sustainability of the Postdoctoral Fellow as a future researcher leader

This work will combine a variety of complementary approaches to explore several general questions related to the ecology of Irish tunas. These include the use of cutting-edge bio-logging tools to explore the impact of catch-and-release fishing on tuna and refine best practices; identify spatial dynamics, population connectivity, and environmental preferences of tuna throughout the NE Atlantic; and to design and test new electronic tagging techniques for small fishes such as albacore tuna. To address these diverse objectives, we have assembled a multidisciplinary team to support the Cullen Fellow, who will use state-of-the-art techniques spanning physiology, bio-logging, genetics, spatial analyses, and hydrodynamics. Expected outcomes of the project include data that will improve stock assessment of tunas across the Atlantic, enhanced understanding of the timing and environmental drivers of tuna appearances in Irish waters, and the provision of new tagging tools for researching fishes in general.

The evolution of heat tolerance and life history in the Anthropocene. The project aims to test a new hypothesis that seeks to explain why the evolution of heat tolerance is constrained: the life-history trade-off hypothesis. We propose that animals with high heat tolerance have a slow life history, whereas rising temperatures increase mortality and favour a fast life-history. Testing this hypothesis will generate a new understanding of how heat tolerance evolution and life history will evolve in the Anthropocene, which can be used to predict which species are likely to thrive under climate change and which will be threatened.