Martin Wightman Dr. Gerhard Pohle is quick to clarify that a spike-covered blowfish on his
shelf isn’t native to these waters. He brings out a stone crab for a
more New Brunswick-appropriate photo-op. And he should know. Pohle
has been counting crustaceans and curating the invertebrates collection
at the Atlantic Reference Centre in Saint Andrews since 1984. The
centre is a research museum that houses specimens of marine life found
everywhere from the Arctic to the Gulf of Maine. “It
all boils down to what species live in the water. That’s our bread and
butter,” says Pohle, now the centre’s director.“But we’re using this
basic tool to try and understand the bigger picture, what’s going on in
the world.” The
reference centre is a partnership between the not-for-profit Huntsman
Marine Science Centre and the federal Fisheries and Oceans department,
and Pohle has been there since its inception. There
is indeed a large library of jars full of preserved fish and crabs of
all sorts, but Pohle also works on applied projects that use the tools
of biodiversity research to answer bigger questions. The centre’s core
task of taxonomy has expanded, and the centre now has partnerships with
industry and public bodies alike. “The spectrum can be anything from somebody coming from the public and saying ‘I found this on the beach,
what is it?’ – we do that – to more elaborate things like this where we
have a rigorous sampling program and we identify everything that is
brought to us.” One of the “more elaborate things” Pohle refers to is a set of long-term studies into the effects of aquaculture. “In
the 1990s, I was involved in a study, probably the first of its kind in
the area, looking at regional impacts, far-field impacts, of
aquaculture. As you know, that is a very large industry in this area.
This was a pioneering study, because not only did it look at far-field
effects – so, not what happens at a cage, but away from the cage – but
also documented that there were some effects from aquaculture in the far field.” “That’s
a while ago, and basically what we are doing now, in co-operation with
the government, and industry, we’re doing a followup, repeating the
work. It’s looking at the species, the community structure of things
that live in that area, and trying to understand what changes are taking
place over time in these areas of aquaculture versus a reference site,
where there is no aquaculture.” Aquaculture itself has changed over the past 20 years, and a new iteration of the same study can help quantify how those changes affect sea life. The final year of data collection has just been completed. Pohle
has also worked on projects to get an inventory of marine life in the
arctic and see how it’s shifted in recent years – data that’s vital to
understanding the effects of climate change. And he’s been part of
assessments of planned marine protected areas in the Atlantic region. The variety of the job is a selling point for Pohle, whose academic background was very specific. “I did my PhD work at the University of Toronto on parasitic crabs, which is a rather esoteric subject. “But to this day, that’s probably what I’m quite well-known for.” It was during his time in Toronto, where he completed both a B.Sc. and a PhD, that Pohle encountered the Huntsman. “Coming from a place like Toronto – and there are many other landlocked universities – it was such an eye-opener
when you came here to Huntsman, because it wasn’t the standard lecture
course that you would take at a university. First, you get the field
experience, but you also get to work in very close quarters over very
short periods of time, and very intensely. If that doesn’t interest you,
then obviously this is not your career choice.” Having
reliable data on the biodiversity in our oceans can provide an early
warning to the effects of climate change or risks to species before
they’re on the brink, Pohle says. Has there been a shift in the numbers
of suspension feeders versus bottom feeders, for example? The
small shifts in community structure are harder to read, but essential
to understanding environmental changes as they’re occurring, rather than
after the fact. But
sometimes the revelation is more obvious: the presence of a new species
in Canada, such as crab found by Brent Wilson, a University of New
Brunswick graduate student doing work at the reference centre. It was, Pohle says,“a very very unusual crab.” “And
I should be knowing my crabs. Turns out this was a crab that was
originally described in Barbados, the Caribbean. In deep waters, mind
you, but still, has never been found here, so this is the first record
of such a crab in Canadian waters, so this is something that will get
published soon. Another one would be that we have found European shrimp
species in the Gulf.” Even in taxonomy, nothing stays the same. Pohle likes it that way. “I
guess the part that I like is that I feel I am contributing to the
bigger picture of understanding what’s happening in the world – rather
than simply fulfilling a service.” Martin Wightman wightman.martin@brunswicknews.com Science and research columnist, and copy editor at Brunswick News. In the Lab appears every other week in Innovate |
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