Biostation researcher wins award

Flathead Lake Biological Station Assistant Research Professor Shawn Devlin is the 2017 recipient of the Raymond B. Lindeman Award from the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO). ASLO is one of the largest and most prestigious international societies for water scientists. The Lindeman Award recognizes an outstanding paper written by a young aquatic scientist. Devlin will receive this award at the annual Aquatic Sciences Meeting in Hawaii later this month.

Devlin’s paper, “Top Consumer Abundance Influences Lake Methane Efflux” published in the journal Nature Communications, showed that methane released from a lake was greatly influenced by the presence or absence of fish. In his research, conducted in Finland prior to arriving at FLBS, Shawn split a small lake in half. In one half he added fish, while the other half remained fishless. A trophic cascade occurred in the half with fish, where the fish ate most of the zooplankton (which feed on bacteria), allowing bacteria that consume methane to grow. This resulted in 10 times less methane being released where fish were present.

Closer to home, Devlin was recently lead author on a paper about mysis shrimp in Flathead Lake entitled “Spatial and Temporal Dynamics of Invasive Freshwater Shrimp (Mysis Diluviana): Long-Term Effects on Ecosystem Properties in a Large Oligotrophic Lake” published in the journal Ecosystems. This paper shows that more than 30 years after arriving in Flathead Lake, Mysis shrimp are still affecting all aspects of Flathead Lake’s ecology, that their population has been fluctuating widely, and that in some years they appear to be reproducing twice as opposed to just once (as previously documented).

Interestingly, current FLBS Director Jim Elser also won this award back when he was a young aquatic scientist. So we have great hopes and expectations for Devlin’s future.