| Academic Year | 2024-2025 |
| rrogers10@qub.ac.uk | |
| Institution | Queen's University, Belfast |
Biography
School: School of Biological Sciences
Pronouns: she/her
Project: Animal behaviour in a changing world: Investigating the effects of multiple stressors
Supervisors: Dr Gareth Arnott, Dr David Fisher & Dr Ross Cuthbert
Undergraduate Education: BA Biological Sciences, University of Oxford
Postgraduate Education: MSc Conservation & Biodiversity, University of Exeter
Research: Human-Induced rapid environmental changes such as climate warming and pollution are major threats to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. These stressors rarely act in isolation and often interact in complex, non-additive ways, leading to effects that differ from responses to individual stressors. Despite this, much research focuses on single stressor impacts, providing an incomplete understanding of how animals cope with rapidly changing environments. As the most flexible component of the phenotype, behaviour may allow animals to plastically adjust to environmental challenges, influencing critical interactions like predation, competition, and reproduction which ultimately shape community structures and ecosystem functioning. Therefore, behaviour presents a pervasive signal to rapidly detect environmental change effects which precede ecosystem-level impacts.
In my PhD, I will use the hermit crab, Pagurus bernhardus, as a model species to explore cognitive and behavioural responses to multiple stressors, such as simultaneous warming and deoxygenation. I will investigate how various stressors affect a range of behaviours related to resource assessment, contests, personality, and risk-taking. Building on previous hermit crab and single-stressor research, I will conduct experiments under controlled laboratory conditions to isolate behavioural changes, while also incorporating RNA signal expression analyses to quantify physiological stress responses. To improve the ecological relevance of laboratory findings, I will also conduct field studies on crab populations in Northern Ireland and Scotland. I will examine behavioural variation along a gradient of anthropogenic disturbances, providing insight into how stressor effects play out in natural environments.
Moreover, I aim to link behavioural responses to broader ecological functions by using common garden experiments and network analysis, exploring how stressor-induced behavioural shifts have the potential to cascade through ecosystems.
