Neea HanströmPhD student

About me

I am a PhD student in Marine Biology. The goal of my PhD thesis is to determine drivers and functions of dinoflagellate parasites in plankton food webs. Parasitic symbionts contribute to the carbon flows in the marine food webs but the extent of the effects they have on the plankton community is still largely unknown. Recent observations show that numerous parasitic dinoflagellates are present in the oceans and are often the dominant cause of parasitic infections in zooplankton. I use DNA metabarcoding and microscopy from field collected samples across the Baltic Sea environmental gradient, to gain better understanding on how parasitic dinoflagellates and zooplankton interact with each other, and what impacts they might have on the marine carbon cycling and energy transfer in the marine food webs.

The main objectives of my projects are to discover the drivers of zooplankton-parasite infections, map the transmission routes in natural seawater, study the effects of protist parasites on host fitness, and to integrate parasitic symbionts in pelagic network models. These results are of great importance to predict how environmental change will affect disease outbreak and energy flow in marine systems.