MdM SEMINAR SERIES - "Predicting anthropogenic impacts on fish: lessons from ancient extinctions and past global change" by Elizabeth Sibert

Title: "Predicting anthropogenic impacts on fish: lessons from ancient extinctions and past global change" 

Speaker: Elizabeth Sibert, Harvard Society of Fellows





Date: Tuesday, October 22nd 2019

Time: 15.30h

Venue: Eureka Auditorium

 

Fish are the most diverse group of vertebrates on the planet today, and are dominant consumers in nearly all modern marine ecosystems. Fish are also a significant part of the human economy, supporting millions of jobs and providing protein for billions of people. However, many fish populations have been greatly reduced in the past 100 years due to over-fishing, pollution, and a rapidly changing global climate regime are driving rapid changes in fish communities and populations around the globe. In this talk, I look to the past as a tool to better understand how fish have responded to other major changes in the earth system. Using microfossil fish teeth and shark scales preserved in deep-sea sediments going back tens of millions of years, I will discuss how fish populations and communities have responded to mass extinctions and global climate change events that have reshaped the planet, and discuss how this deep-time perspective may help inform our understanding of marine ecosystem dynamics of today’s anthropogenically changing ocean. 

Brief bio 

Dr. Elizabeth Sibert is currently a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows and a visiting postdoctoral fellow at Yale University. She received her MS and PhD in biological oceanography from Scripps Intuition of Oceanography in 2013 and 2016 and her Bachelor's in Biology in 2011 from University of California San Diego. Her research focuses on the intersection of biological oceanography and paleobiology, using microfossil fish teeth and shark scales, alongside paleo-environmental proxies, to assess how marine ecosystems have responded to major global change events throughout Earth's history. She has spent much of her career working on deep time, exploring extinctions and events from the past 100 million years. She is at ICTA-UAB for 1 month as a visiting researcher, working on several projects involving fish teeth and marine ecosystem modeling, and is excited to learn more about the interdisciplinary work done at ICTA-UAB.