Project description
Clocks and cues driving marine vertical migrations
In the oceans, vast numbers of animals move up and down through the water each day and across the seasons. These vertical movements shape marine ecosystems, support fisheries and influence global carbon cycling. However, it remains unclear to what extent these large, coordinated migrations are driven by internal biological clocks and/or by direct responses to environmental changes and gradients in light, temperature or oxygen. The ERC-funded BICLOPS project will tackle this question by studying the copepod Calanus finmarchicus, a key species in the North Atlantic. Researchers aim to determine how environmental parameters and cycles affect its circadian clock and identify which genes control daily and seasonal rhythms. Project findings will improve our understanding of pelagic behaviour and help predict ecosystem responses to climate change.
Objective
Coordinated vertical migrations of animals in open waters (pelagic zone) are among the largest biomass movements on Earth. They structure marine ecosystem and are thereby essential to humans (e.g. fisheries, carbon-cycle). Yet, the mechanisms of these migrations are hardly understood, especially the impact of endogenous clocks vs. direct responses to environmental cycles. Endogenous clocks are central to various organismal rhythms. Importantly, they maintain organismal rhythmicity even under constant environmental conditions, clearly distinguishing clock-driven processes from those that are directly environmentally-controlled. Pelagic vertical migration behavior, environment and clocks strongly feed back onto each other, but molecular mechanistic functioning under these conditions is at present not understood at all, largely due to the lack of a pelagic lab animal model.
BICLOPS will determine the role of endogenous clocks and different environmental cues in shaping pelagic vertical migrations, using the copepod Calanus finmarchicus – a Northern Atlantic ecological key species – as a lab model system. I will combine my expertise with this species and with ecological and functional molecular approaches to address four objectives:
– determine how light affects the circadian clock and define neural clock centers and light receptors.
– determine circadian clock functional interactions and effects of temperature/oxygen cycles.
– identify external/internal regulators of copepod seasonal diapause.
– determine how individual clock components affect diel and seasonal rhythmicity by functional clock interference.
By determining clock functioning in a representative pelagic key species under environmental cycles shaped by the migrations themselves, BICLOPS will transform our knowledge of pelagic rhythm mechanisms. Understanding the processes that structure pelagic ecosystems is essential to predict their responses to climate change and implement measures to preserve them.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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27570 BREMERHAVEN
Germany
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