Associate Professor Scott Ling's (BSc Hons 2000, PhD 2009) fascination with science began as a backyard project when he was a boy growing up in Tasmania.
With his cocker spaniel by his side, he became aware of a brown trout in the stream that ran through his family’s garden. Keen to encourage more fish, he read widely and built a system of dams and weirs to improve the local aquatic habitat.
By the time he was a teenager, he was rewarded with a population of 30 trout, a healthy creek and a love for ecology. He could identify each trout by their pattern of spots and observed how the fish behaved.
But when his cocker spaniel passed away at fifteen, something unexpected happened. Ducks, which the dog had kept away, began to muddy the waters and eat the snails that had controlled the amount of water weed. The system collapsed.
“There was this cascading change in my backyard,” Ling said. “It wasn't until I got to third year at university and started reading freshwater ecology journals that I realised, ‘This is what I've seen, but I just haven't recorded any of it.’
“And so, for me, university was about getting formal training in how to record these changes, and then how to run experiments to really work out what was going on.”
Ling is now Associate Professor and Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow in marine ecology at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS). His research focuses on how and why productive reef ecosystems collapse into impoverished systems that can be difficult to reverse.
Growing up, Ling also spent time at his family shack at Bicheno on Tasmania’s east coast, where he keenly fished and dived in marine habitats rich with giant kelp.
“The kelp was so thick, boats would tie off on it, rather than anchoring,” he said.
Since then, the population of giant kelp along Tasmania’s east coast has declined by 95 per cent and has been replaced by more warm-tolerant understorey kelp species. The reason – climate change and a related extension of warm, nutrient-poor water coming from the mainland. There has also been a dramatic influx of long-spined sea urchins from northern waters that is creating urchin barrens devoid of all seaweeds – in stark contrast to healthy reefs which support rock lobsters, abalone and a raft of endemic species.
On return visits to his family shack, he noticed mainland fish species appearing in the Bicheno gulch.
“There has been a real regime shift in the ecology of eastern Tasmania from my childhood to the present day,” he said.
“We need to build resilience of these systems to further changes. Once the ecosystems collapse, they are very hard to recover.” Associate Professor Scott Ling
Photo: Maeve McKenna
After completing a Bachelor of Science, Ling did his honours and PhD in marine ecology at the University under the supervision of alumnus Professor Craig Johnson (BSc Hons 1979). A take-home message from his studies was that, to look after our marine environments, an ounce of prevention is worth a tonne of cure.
“We need to build resilience of these systems to further changes. Once the ecosystems collapse, they are very hard to recover,” Ling said.
“One way of building in resilience is mass removal of sea urchins before the barrens form. We also need a better balance between predators (rock lobsters) and prey (urchins).”
The research team Ling is part of has shown that building up the numbers of big lobsters is key for keeping urchins in check. And then there is giant kelp forest restoration research, which for him focuses on locally reducing competition from warm-tolerant understorey kelp species to allow giant kelp to re-establish a foothold.
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Written by Katherine Johnston for Alumni Magazine Issue 54, 2023.
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Top of page: An urchin barren on Tasmania's east coast | Photo: Scott Ling