Postdoctoral Fellowship: PRFB: Mechanisms and impacts of synergistic stressors in an imperiled marine reptile

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2024, Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions Between Genomes, Environment, and Phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. Environmental stressors and immune challenges are increasingly common facets of life for every organism.

How individuals, populations, and species respond to these challenges, particularly when they may have synergistic negative effects, can influence individual fitness and ecology, and ecosystem-level processes. Quantifying these responses across biological levels within individuals is critical to understanding the co-evolution of stress and immune systems in diverse taxa, as well as the impacts that synergistic stressors may have on populations and ecosystems.

This project will holistically characterize this synergy from a molecular to a behavioral scale in an endangered and understudied vertebrate immune system through the integration of multidisciplinary data, including whole-tissue transcriptome data in particular. The results of this project can be translated for application to other vertebrate and even human systems to improve our understanding of how they/we respond to simultaneous stress and disease in an increasingly stressful and pathogen-rich world.

This project seeks to answer the question: do sublethal disease and anthropogenic stressors synergistically exacerbate stress responses and decrease immunity in marine reptiles, and if so, through what mechanisms? Green turtles (Chelonia mydas) commonly face an epizootic disease (fibropapillomatosis; FP) that causes individuals to present with tumors that can limit maintenance behaviors and reduce survival probability.

Vessel-turtle interactions at developmental habitats can further impact fitness, energy expenditure, and resource acquisition, and physiological responses to these interactions might synergize with simultaneous immune responses to FP. This project will focus on juvenile green turtles at a high-use area near Crystal River, FL. Green turtles at this area face both FP and a putatively stressful increase in vessel activity during a 2.5-month recreational scalloping season.

The fellow will use a range of approaches (e.g., passive acoustic monitoring, animal-borne data collection systems, RNAseq) to quantify vessel abundance and potential interactions, and any turtle physiological and behavioral responses. The fellow will compare data across four categories (FP positive or negative, before or during scallop season) of sampled individuals to determine if and how stressors and immune challenges interact synergistically in marine reptiles.

This project will provide the fellow with experience generating and analyzing data to study integrative physiology and disease ecology, and will allow the fellow to provide training in core computer science skills to students and researchers from diverse backgrounds.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.