One Health Seminar: Using historical ecology to measure the impacts of anthropogenic disturbances on parasitic diseases of fish

The last One Health seminar of the winter semester will be on Wednesday, April 9 at 12:30 featuring Dr. Whitney Preisser, Assistant Professor at Kennesaw State University, Georgia, USA. This webinar will be on Teams only. 

Dr. Preisser will discuss two projects using fluid-preserved specimens to determine the impacts of climate change, heavy metal pollution, microplastics, and reservoir damming on parasitic diseases of fish over long time spans. First, using more than 600 marine fish specimens collected between 1880 and 2019 in the Salish Sea, she tracked changes in parasite communities over time and investigated the potential for heavy metal pollution and sea surface temperature to have caused the observed changes. Second, using over 500 freshwater fish collected between 1999 and 2016 in Georgia, she explored the effects of reservoir damming on the diversity and abundance of parasitic infections. Using a subset of those fish, she also quantified the prevalence of microplastics and nanoplastics in digestive tracts and searched for links between plastics and parasites.