West Coast Lakes Project
Bolnick Lab, University of Connecticut
Exploring ecological and immunological sources of geographic variation in parasite prevalence: a survey of three-spine stickleback fish on Vancouver Island, Canada
Project Overview
Tapeworms and other parasites are often unevenly distributed across host populations, being abundant in some while scarce in others. This study examines whether this variation is influenced by spatial differences in the environment, host diet, or host immunity. This research focuses on the spatial epidemiology of tapeworms on Vancouver Island, involving all three host species: copepods, stickleback, and piscivorous birds. You can find more information about this project on the Bolnick Lab website.
This work is in collaboration with Amanda Hund, Jessica Hite, and Sebastian Schreiber.
Fieldwork
My role on this project was to assist Heather Alexander with field surveys of 8 lakes around the Bamfield area, a remote coastal community on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, Canada. We travelled to these lakes to set traps, collect samples, and survey the local bird populations every month from July 2023 to July 2024 - rain or shine! Most of our tasks, including fishing for stickleback, towing for zooplankton, or collecting water samples for eDNA, were conducted from a portable kayak.
Deploying minnow traps near the shoreline to catch stickleback in Bewley lake