Fish hook: Study opportunities lead UTC researchers to Finland

UTC senior Carter Jordan, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in environmental science with a concentration in biodiversity, conservation and natural resources, stands near the Tennessee River at Coolidge Park. Photo by Angela Foster.

When he first arrived on the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga campus, Carter Jordan wasn’t sure what direction he wanted to take.

Now a senior, Jordan—pursuing a bachelor’s degree in environmental science with a concentration in biodiversity, conservation and natural resources; minors in Geographic Information Systems and chemistry; and an Honors College Innovations in Honors student—still has options for his post-undergraduate career.

He has a natural affinity for identifying insects—“Not a lot of people let a beetle crawl on their arms,” he said—and interests in global change biology, but an “out of the blue” research opportunity to study behavioral ecology led him to Finland the past two summers to learn about the mating habits of the sand goby.

Needless to say, once he started researching the world of fish, he was hooked.

“I kind of got a better idea of what I want to study because I do want to go to graduate school; before, I had just been floating around and didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do,” said Jordan, a 2020 graduate of Mt. Juliet (Tennessee) High School. “But after studying behavioral ecology, I have a better idea of what I want to do now.”

During the summers of 2022 and 2023, Jordan accompanied Guerry Professor of Biology Hope Klug to the Tvärminne Zoological Station, a marine station located at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland and the oldest and largest infrastructure for coastal marine research in the Baltic Sea.

Sand goby on hand

The research focused on understanding how competition for nesting sites can influence mating and parental decisions, with experiments conducted using the sand goby, a small marine fish. In this species, males compete to be chosen as a mate by females, and females are choosy and tend to prefer males who are good fathers; for example, males that build a suitable nest and tend to their eggs.

“On a broader sense, this project helped to orient me as I go into possibly a Ph.D. program or pursue a master’s,” Jordan said, “but on a very small level, it definitely helped me with things like identification—because these fish are kind of hard to tell apart.

“It also helped me with things like learning seine fishing; you drag the two poles, but it’s kind of a cool life skill.”

Last year, Jordan joined Klug, undergraduate student Gianni Rasnick and lecturer Sarah Farnsley to Tvärminne for the research experience. Klug said it was important to have two students accompany her for that trip, calling it a “really intense field season because they had to collect a lot of fish and do a lot of behavioral recordings.”

Rasnik was the lead undergrad while Jordan was introduced to the process.

“It was an opportunity that came out of the blue because I was between research projects,” Jordan recalled. “We looked at how nest competition and resource acquisition affected how many eggs were produced. We also looked at parental care but didn’t focus on it.”

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This summer, Jordan and Klug continued the research, focusing on both parental care and egg counts.

Why study both? Sand goby are known for filial cannibalism; in other words, a parent eats its offspring.

Klug has made numerous research excursions to Finland to study sand goby since 2004—and even was a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Helsinki from 2008 to 2010.

“When I was doing my Ph.D. at Florida, I was studying filial cannibalism,” Klug said. “From an evolutionary perspective, it’s really hard to imagine how something like that could evolve because if you’re always eating your babies, you’re eating the genes that code for that behavior. You’d expect something like that to just be eliminated from a population.

“The fish systems we had in Florida weren’t quite right for some of the questions we wanted to answer, and we wanted a fish species that had highly clumped eggs and low oxygen availability. There was this opportunity to collaborate with this lab in Finland, so I started going to Tvärminne Zoological Station to work with the sand goby.”

Hope Klug and Carter Jordan catching fish at the Tvärminne Zoological Station, a marine station located at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland. Photo courtesy of Hope Klug.

Klug said she has drawn interesting perspectives from studying the Florida fish species and the sand goby of Finland, providing a “more holistic view of why fish in general might be eating their own offspring.”

“This fish species we work with in Finland is a really good species because it exhibits behavior that’s very typical of nesting fish species,” she said, “so it’s a good model system for a lot of questions related to animal behavior and reproduction in fish.”

Several years ago, Klug—who joined the UTC faculty in 2011—wrote a National Science Foundation grant proposal seeking funding of research toward a better understanding of reproduction and mating in general. That grant has allowed her to bring students with her to Tvärminne.

“What we do is we go out and collect fish; we have these big nets, we drag them through the water and we seine,” Klug said. “We bring our fish back and put them in these big holding tanks in the greenhouse, then we run our experiments in these tanks that are set up to mimic the natural conditions as much as possible. That’s how we’re able to get our data.”

The research Jordan conducted this summer will serve as a basis for his honors thesis, Klug said. She also expects the work from his sand goby research opportunities to lead to a peer-reviewed publication.

“Carter is a fantastic researcher,” Klug said, “and one of the amazing things about him is his incredible ability to work independently and problem solve—which is really important when doing field work.

“He also has a very good sense of the big-picture questions that we’re answering and how the day-to-day data collection is ultimately going to inform our understanding of reproduction in this species.”

Jordan said the travel abroad research experiences have helped opened his eyes to possibilities he had never considered before enrolling at UTC.

“These opportunities have given me a lot of international education and scientific education and have also helped me figure out what I actually want to do with my life,” said Jordan, who had not traveled on an airplane before coming to college.

His resume now has three international research travel experiences: the two summers at Tvärminne Zoological Station and a public health-related study abroad trip to San Salvador Island in the Bahamas.

“When I first got to UTC, who would’ve thought I would go to Finland twice and the Bahamas? Kind of cool, right?”