FULLY FUNDED – Understanding small and large scale factors of seaweed biofouling using eDNA

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Seaweed production is currently rapidly expanding in the Northern Atlantic European Coastline and is an environmentally sustainable, zero-input industry that provides jobs and services arising from derived human food, agri-feed, fertilisers, biostimulants, products for cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. However, in the nutrient-rich waters of the North Atlantic, biofouling in early (seed ropes) and late (harvest) seaweed growth can have unpredictable and devastating impacts on product yield and quality. Seaweed biofouling occurs when larval planktonic organisms settle on fronds and grow into adult forms (e.g., bryozoans, hydrozoans, tunicates).

Although biofouling affects all seaweed farms across the North Atlantic coast, there is significant variation of the biofouling species and severity from site to site as well as from year to year. It is important to thus capture this variability using both small scale, within farm monitoring, as well as larger scale monitoring, with sites across a wide geographical area that encompasses diverse environmental conditions.

This knowledge is crucial for understanding how the marine environment drives biofouling and for producing actionable, user-friendly tools for predicting biofouling species in space and time. The PhD student will link to two recently funded BBSRC project on sustainable aquaculture to deploy new molecular eDNA tools to explore the variability of biofouling epibionts at the plankton stage and explore the factors that drive their occurrence and settlement on farmed seaweed blades. The PhD student will be supported by a world class supervisory team of marine and molecular ecologists (Dr Sofie Spatharis, Prof. Martin Llewellyn, Dr Anna McGregor) and the research seaweed farm of the Kilchoan Estate (Marnik Van Cauter, Scientific coordinator) while they will also get valuable experience working alongside industry within our network of 9 seaweed produces from the UK, Norway and Sweden. The student will have the opportunity to develop skills at the cutting edge of molecular biology (eDNA monitoring of plankton) and analytical techniques on seawater quality and engage in marine biological fieldwork in the Kilchoan Estate kelp farm as well as controlled experiments with our state-of-the-art mobile mesocosm facility at Millport FSC.