University of Alaska Fairbanks SCHOOL OF FISHERIES AND OCEAN SCIENCES  
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SFOS Newsletter
Spring 2007

Featured Faculty: Amanda Rosenberger

by Carin Bailey, SFOS Public Information Officer

Amanda Rosenberger was recently hired as an assistant professor of fisheries at the School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences as part of the new fisheries program expansion. Dr. Rosenberger specializes in fish ecology and conservation. She begins teaching two courses this fall, including a new year-long course for undergraduates called “Fisheries Techniques” that she is co-teaching with the new SFOS fisheries undergraduate coordinator, Trent Sutton.

Below is a transcript of my interview with Amanda.

What inspired you to study fish?

I remember the day that I decided to study fish. I was in college and had a professor who was a fish ecologist and taxonomist - a terrific teacher and a very important person in my life. Recently, I had started getting excited about zoology and ecology in general. One day my professor told us a story about the angler fish, a deep-sea fish that uses lures to bring in their prey. He said that the angler fish we usually think of are probably females because most male angler fish never grow very large and spend their lives parasitizing on female angler fish. Male angler fish lose their own external features and end up sharing their circulatory system with the female and mating with her for her entire life. I thought this was too cool. I decided I had to work on an organism or a group of organisms that could adapt to almost any aquatic environment in the entire world, from the deserts to the bottom of the ocean. If I was going to study vertebrates, I was going to study fish.

How will you inspire your students?

People are inspired by different things. When I heard the story about the angler fish, I was already excited about ecology, biology and evolution. You have to warm students up to getting excited about these things. Fisheries is such an integrated field that it’s easy to capture someone’s imagination no matter what makes them click. That is what I like about the field.

The key to getting anyone interested in something is to tell them interesting stories. There are so many great stories about fish around the planet. For me, it was the story of the angler fish. I like to tell people about Lake Victoria in East Africa and the fisheries management history there, or the history of cod fisheries in Newfoundland. There are tragic stories, exciting stories, and some fascinating stories in the world of fish. You tell those stories to students and see what captures their imagination-- what really gets them thinking about how they fit into this large field of fisheries. It helps students understand that this field is not beyond them and that they can play a role.

I want to engage my students by getting them out there and working directly with the fish. Field work is often what gets students excited about fisheries. I want to get them out there tagging the fish, taking habitat data, and seeing all of the different environments. I want them to start coming up with their own questions and seeing the research process in action.

When I did my first field work, I was still a teenager. I remember grabbing fish in the Hudson River, getting muddy and dirty and having so much fun. I couldn’t believe that I could actually make money doing this.

Do you have any specific research interests in Alaska?

I might want to look specifically at climate change because the aquatic environment in Alaska, if I understand how things are going, may be changing pretty rapidly. Glaciers are being lost and snowmelt/hydraulic regimes are shifting. Fish probably have strategies for coping with these kinds of changes. For instance, one of the ways that fish cope with wildfire is by having a plastic life history. Salmonids in particular have a flexible life history that helps them cope with the variability in their environment. I would be interested in the life history strategies fish have for dealing with the kind of changes that climate change might cause.

What do you think is special about studying fish in Alaska?

There are really no end of things that are special about studying fish in Alaska. For one thing, we have the most intact watersheds in the U.S. proper. When you study broad ecological questions about how aquatic systems work in the Lower 48, you always encounter the history of human insult on the landscape. It can make it very hard to ask fundamental questions about how aquatic ecosystems work, particularly running water systems. It’s very difficult to look at how an aquatic landscape works when its functions are impaired so drastically by channelization activity and urbanization of the watershed.
What Alaska offers to an aquatic ecologist or somebody who is interested in evolution, fish habitat, and how fish respond to habitat, is that you can conduct research in environments that are almost untouched. That is incredibly exciting and it’s an opportunity I would like to take advantage of as much as possible. I’m not saying that humans don’t have any impacts in Alaska, but we do have the opportunity to look at watersheds that are more intact than anywhere else.

Amanda Rosenberger received her Ph.D. in fisheries biology in 2003 from Virginia Tech, her M.S. in zoology in 1997 from the University of Florida, and her B.A. from Simon’s Rock College of Bard in Environmental Studies. She joined UAF in November 2006.