Sam Shry recently started his PhD at Karlstad University. Here he writes about his previous work and what he intends to do as a PhD student at Karlstad University:

Hej! My name is Sam Shry and I am another new PhD student just starting in the RivEM research group. Like Sebastian, I will also be working under the EU project LIFE Connects, but my primary research focus will be Atlantic Salmon and their migratory response to river restoration and re-connectivity. My main supervisor is Olle Calles, with assistant supervisors Martin Österling, Gustav Hellström (SLU), and Anders Nilsson (Lund University).

I am originally from Arkansas in the US, but have lived in Sweden for the last four years. I became interested in fisheries when I was working on my bachelor’s degree at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Inspiring teachers and amazing internship experiences motivated me to pursue a career in fisheries. After graduation, I worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a field technician, working primarily with salmonid management and monitoring in the mid-Columbia River.

During my time as an undergraduate, I also met a wonderful Swedish woman who eventually became my wife. I decided to move to Sweden to live with her and, at the same time, started my master’s degree in Fish and Wildlife Management at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Umeå. I had an amazing experience in the master’s program and had the opportunity to work on many great projects. My master’s thesis investigated the effect of condition on smoltification and migration in anadromous Brown Trout.

After finishing my masters, I started working for the County Administrative Board of Gävleborg as a project leader in fish migration and restoration. I worked with implementing river restoration measures, fish reintroduction efforts, and conducted fish migration studies throughout Gävleborg.

As a PhD student at Karlstad University, my research will focus on migration of Atlantic Salmon at three critical life stages (smolt, spawner, and post-spawner/kelt). Within the LIFE Connects project, thirteen dams are to be removed, ten fish passage solutions are to be built, and over 530 km of river habitat in seven river systems will be positively impacted. We want to evaluate the impact of these measures on Atlantic Salmon populations in these rivers and their response to restoration and re-connectivity. We will evaluate their migratory response over these three critical life stages using acoustic telemetry as our primary tool. With the use of high-resolution telemetry, we hope to gain greater insight into the timing, duration, hindrances, and mortality of these vital, large-scale migrations.

In my free time you can usually catch me by or in the water. In general, I enjoy being out in nature and usually try to fill my weekends with outdoor adventures. If you have any questions feel free to contact me by email or come by my office.

Look forward to meeting you!

Sebastian Rock recently started his PhD at Karlstad University. Here he writes about his previous work and what he intends to do as a PhD student at Karlstad University:

Well hi there! I’m Sebastian Rock, a new PhD student at NRRV research group at Karlstad University. Originally from the US Virgin Islands, I’ve lived across the US and later, all around Italy as well, as such, I’m hoping to bring a little extra warmth to this cold part of Sweden. Working as a part of the Life Connects project under the supervision of Martin Österling, Olle Calles, Johan Watz and Anders Nilsson (from Lund University), I’ll be working on conservation and reintroduction of highly threatened parasitic freshwater river mussels. I’ll predominantly be focused on the Freshwater Pear Mussel (Margaritifera margfaritifera) and the Thick Shelled Riven Mussel (Unio crassus) in the Skåne region in south Sweden. Where possible I hope to do scientific outreach and education to help raise both the general public interest in the less well-known aquatic fauna as well as the importance of ecologic conservation.

I started my academic life like many others as a bachelor student, myself at Maastricht University’s Maastricht Science Program in the Netherlands. Only founded in 2010, it was designed as an open end Liberal Arts and Science program, where students there are encouraged to develop their own interdisciplinary curriculum to better adapt to the modern vastly interconnected research environment. As the son of two Biologists, and as someone intensely interested in anything to do with animals, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree as I focused almost all my attention towards the biological sciences ranging from ecology to psychopharmacology. As part of the program, once a semester, students take part in a month long research project, designed with the intention of not only exposing students to a wide range of academic fields and topics, but also to provide substantial research experience to build future degrees with. Here, I got along with the zoology professor Dr John Sloggett and together organized a series of research projects on the behavioral toxicology of an invasive planarians flatworm species from North America, Girardia tigrina; these projects ultimately evolved in to my BSc thesis.

From Maastricht, I moved on to a Research Masters degree at Leiden University, also in the Netherlands, where I worked with Drs. Christian Tudorache and Marcel Schaaf at the Institute of Biology Leiden where I was able to apply my interdisciplinary background to the study of stress coping in larval zebrafish. Using Multidimensional reduction techniques, I worked on modeling coping style, the inter-individual differences in behavior (or the animal equivalent of personality) with a more straightforward and concrete measure of gestation time. Over the course of my Masters I continued to design smaller research projects for BSc students as well as working with a local international school to give short seminars and demonstrations of simple scientific projects with wide reaching implications to give them a better idea of, and hopefully inspire them to peruse an education in science.

As a researcher at KAU – NRRV I hope to apply my interdisciplinary education to the study of the effects the parasitic mussels have on their host fishes. In the case of the Pearl Mussel, salmonids, and in that of the Thick Shelled Mussel, predominantly minnows and bullheads. As much of my work will be relating to the reintroduction of these, mostly stationary, endangered parasites, they will need to be reintroduced through their more mobile host fish. As knowledge on the behavioral effects of the parasite on the fish is very limited, I hope to expand it be looking at competition behavior between infested and non-infested fish, as well as other changes in behavior, which may reduce overall fitness. After all, if we kill off all the hosts, that won’t help the parasite any more than doing nothing at all. I hope to include genomic, immunologic and abiotic factors in the conservation efforts with a little help from some multidimensional modeling to stitch it all together.

• 

• 

Away from the office, you can find me either outside, fishing and hunting for mushrooms, or inside building an eclectic collection of reptiles and amphibians in unique enclosures as I experiment with culinary sciences to the sound of a bizarre musical library. Feel free to stop by my office to talk about research, or any of those last three things. If you care to follow any of my sometimes semi-science related stuff you find me on Instagram @srock456.

Cheers and see you around!