Postdoc, PhD

Erin S. Dunlop

Research Interests

Evolution is the underlying process shaping life history, behaviour, species interactions, and population dynamics of the world’s biota. Humans have significantly altered the environment and our activities have exerted tremendous selective forces on living resources. Harvest is one of these activities and has the potential to cause rapid evolutionary change in a variety of important traits and behaviours. Unfortunately, fisheries science has been slow to acknowledge the occurrence or importance of harvest-induced evolution; one reason is that genetic changes are believed by many to occur over extremely long timescales. It is becoming increasingly evident, however, that evolution can unfold in only a few generations, a timescale that is relevant ecologically and that should make evolutionary change a concern to managers of exploited resources.
 
My research examines the interacting ecological and evolutionary impacts of humans on fish populations. I use a combined empirical and theoretical approach to study those processes which scale from genes to populations and the aim of my research is to bring an evolutionary perspective to fisheries science in particular, and to resource management in general.
 
 

Biography

Erin S. Dunlop completed a Bachelor of Science degree in 1999 at the University of Guelph, Canada and completed her Ph.D. in 2005 at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her Ph.D. research examined the patterns and processes of life history variation in harvested freshwater fish. During her Ph.D., Erin was supervised by Dr. Brian Shuter (Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources) and Dr. Helen Rodd (University of Toronto). In the summer of 2005, Erin started postdoctoral research at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria, under the guidance of Dr. Ulf Dieckmann in the Evolution and Ecology Program. Her research at IIASA was part of The European Research Training Network on Fisheries-induced Adaptive Changes in Exploited Stocks. In fall 2006, Erin moved to Bergen, Norway to conduct postdoctoral research with Dr. Mikko Heino at the Institute of Marine Research and University of Bergen. Her current research focuses on fisheries-induced evolution and is funded by the Norwegian research council project, “Sustainable harvesting of marine resources: interactions between demographic, ecological and evolutionary effects of fishing”.
 
 

Modeling Life-History Evolution

In collaboration with Mikko Heino and Ulf Dieckmann, I have been working on developing the eco-genetic modeling framework. The goal of this modeling approach is to follow the evolution of quantitative life-history traits in an ecologically rich setting. In an eco-genetic model, the ecological and evolutionary timescales are fully embedded so that the rate, transients, magnitude, and endpoints of evolution can be examined in contemporary time (e.g., in timesteps of 1 year and extending for decades or centuries). The genetic component of eco-genetic models includes the quantitative inheritance, heritable variation, and phenotypic expression of life-history traits. The ecological setting of an eco-genetic model includes density and frequency-dependence, phenotypic plasticity, and the explicit modeling of processes including individual growth, maturation, reproduction, inheritance, and mortality. An example eco-genetic model can be found in Dunlop et al. (2007).
 
Eco-genetic models are particularly suited to studying fisheries-induced evolution because they are tightly coupled with the type of empirical data available for many fish populations, they can be used to follow the evolution of multiple life-history traits (e.g., genetic determinants of growth, maturation tendency, reproductive effort), and they can be used to predict the effects of alternative management measures on the traits, recruitment processes, and population dynamics of exploited stocks.
 
We are currently developing eco-genetic models for a variety of stocks and to ask a number of interesting research questions pertaining to harvest-induced evolution. Anne Maria Eikeset, PhD student at the University of Oslo, is developing an eco-genetic model of Northeast Arctic cod, the world’s largest cod stock. An extension of Ms. Eikeset’s work is to combine the eco-genetic model with an economic model to explore the economic impacts of fisheries-induced evolution in Northeast Arctic cod. EvoFish postdoc Dr. Katja Enberg is using eco-genetic models to explore the ecology and evolution of recovery in exploited fish populations. Davnah Urbach, PhD student at the University of Lausanne, is working on the evolution of mating preference and the impact of fishing on sexual selection. Research on the influence of stock structure on fisheries-induced evolution in Icelandic cod is being carried out by PhD student Heidi Pardoe at the University of Iceland. With the help of an eco-genetic model, Dr. Véronique Thériault is researching the influence of fishing on the evolution of residency in brook charr. Also in development is an eco-genetic model used to study the influence of marine reserves on the evolutionary effects of fishing in species which undergo an annual spawning migration.
 
 

Collaborators

In addition to researchers in EvoFish, past or present collaborators include:
Marissa L. Baskett, National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, U.S.A.
Ulf Dieckmann, IIASA, Austria
Anne Maria Eikeset, University of Oslo, Norway
Heidi Pardoe, Marine Research Institute, Iceland
Mark Ridgway, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Canada
Helen Rodd, University of Toronto, Canada
Brian Shuter, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Canada
Geoffrey Steinhart, Lake Superior State University, U.S.A.
Nils Christian Stenseth, University of Oslo, Norway
Véronique Thériault, Laval University, Canada
Davnah Urbach, University of Lausanne, Switzerland