BU is world number one for fish biology research

Date: 22 March 2012

BU’s Centre for Conservation Ecology and Environmental Sciences is producing the best fish biology research in the world.

Research emerging from the Centre for Conservation Ecology and Environmental Sciences at Bournemouth University (BU) is rated the best in the world for the study of fish biology.

Head of the Centre, Professor Rudy Gozlan, said: “Fish are carried by a vascular network of rivers and are the blood of millions of people that rely on healthy inland fisheries for food, business and sport fishing. We are delighted that our research contributes to that knowledge and comes in support of human communities all around the world.”

The statistic is from the bibliographic database ‘Scopus’, which calculates institutional strengths, based on article clusters.

Institutions are ranked according to three measures:

• Publication leadership, calculated through the proportion of articles from BU in the fish biology cluster
• Reference leadership, calculated through the proportion of citations in the fish biology cluster that cite BU articles
• State-of-the-art leadership, outlining how recent BU’s fish biology references are.

The accolade comes as BU researchers enter discussions with the Environment Agency regarding the testing of wild fish populations for the deadly parasite Sphaerothecum destruens.

More commonly known as the Rosette Agent, the parasite killed 90% of UK salmon in lab tests and has been blamed for the rapid demise of Leucaspius delineatus, or the sunbleak species, in parts of Europe.

Professor Gozlan said: “Since the first discovery of the Rosette Agent in wild populations five years ago we have carried out a set of tests and all species were highly susceptible to infection. We have carried out further tests in semi-natural conditions and found the same results. We looked at one wild fish population and found the disease present. In California our colleagues did the same in a population of returning salmon and found the parasite in around 40% of the fish. The Environment Agency will not determine the impact of the Rosette Agent unless they start specific health checks.”

More information on the Centre for Conservation Ecology and Environmental Sciences can be found on the centre’s webpages.