Leigh Torres
Oregon State University, OR·Ecology & Evolution
Oceans are warming and changing quickly, but how marine animals will fare is largely unknown. A key question is whether the small animals at the base of the food web remain abundant and nutritious enough, and what happens to the large predators that depend on them.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Biology
- Topics
blue whale
Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda
krill
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Test how temperature affects krill (Nyctiphanes australis) metabolic rate, energy requirements and body condition through controlled experiments measuring bioenergetic and biochemical responses.
- Quantify the energy content, distribution and density of krill swarms available to foraging blue whales in the South Taranaki Bight, New Zealand, using net tows and active acoustic surveys.
- Measure individual pygmy blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda) health by scoring body condition from drone imagery and assaying skin and blubber biopsies for stress, nutrition and reproductive hormones.
- Track population-level foraging and breeding effort by recording blue whale vocalizations with hydrophones and relating calling patterns to prey and environmental conditions.
- Integrate prey, predator and environmental data through multivariate analyses into Species Health Models that predict co-responses to climate change and identify thresholds in population resilience.
More about the research
This project follows one such pair: krill, shrimp-like crustaceans that form dense swarms, and blue whales, which feed on them. The aim is to see how changing ocean conditions alter the amount and quality of krill available, and how that in turn shows up in whale body condition, hormone levels, and effort spent feeding and breeding.
Why it matters
Managers usually act only after a population has already declined. Species Health Models built here could shift monitoring toward health-based thresholds, allowing protective measures for whales and their krill prey before numbers fall. Insights into how krill respond to changing conditions could inform management of marine predators and prey more broadly, and public interest in blue whales offers a route to wider awareness of climate impacts on the ocean.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Erin Meyer-Gutbrod
University of South Carolina-Columbia, SC·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether North Atlantic right whales leave or stay at feeding sites based on measurable prey-density thresholds, using an individual movement model built from repeated sightings of identified whales.
Emmanouil Tentzeris
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Engineering
Adapt a low-cost, open-source drifting logger that is ballasted to follow a target water density, overcoming the cost and payload limits of existing autonomous ocean observing platforms.
Chris Funk
Colorado State University-Fort Collins, CO·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether cutthroat trout predators are more sensitive to rising water temperatures than their tailed frog tadpole prey, combining stream environment measurements, genomics and physiology experiments to measure heat adaptation.
The school
Oregon State University: 29 labs on PI Pages, $372M a year on research, 238 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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