Terra Dressler

Stillwater Sciences

Fish habitat temperatures are increasing due to human impacts including climate change. For broadly distributed species, thermal tolerance can vary at the population level, making it challenging to predict which populations are most vulnerable to warming. Populations inhabiting warm range boundaries may be more resilient to these changes due to ada...

Critical thermal maxima methodology (CTM) has been used to infer acute upper thermal tolerance in fishes since the 1950s, yet its ecological relevance remains debated. In this study, the authors synthesize evidence to identify methodological concerns and common misconceptions that have limited the interpretation of critical thermal maximum (CTmax;...

Critical thermal maxima methodology (CTM) has been used to infer acute upper thermal tolerance in fishes since the 1950s, yet its ecological relevance remains debated. Here, we synthesize evidence to identify methodological concerns and common misconceptions that have limited the interpretation of CTmax (value for an individual fish during one tria...

Female-biased mortality has been consistently reported in Pacific salmon during their adult upriver migration. We collected coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch (Walbaum, 1792)) upon arrival at their spawning grounds to test whether females are more prone to cardiac oxygen limitations following exercise stress. We used a surgical approach to periodica...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/conphys/coab016.].

The ability to properly identify species present in a landscape is foundational to ecology and essential for natural resource management and conservation. However, many species are often unaccounted for due to ineffective direct capture and visual surveys, especially in aquatic environments. Environmental DNA metabarcoding is an approach that overc...

Female-biased mortality has been repeatedly reported in Pacific salmon during their upriver migration in both field studies and laboratory-holding experiments, especially in the presence of multiple environmental stressors, including thermal stress. Here we used coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) to test whether females exposed to elevated water te...

Environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis is increasingly used for biomonitoring and research of fish populations and communities by environmental resource managers and academic researchers. Although managers are much interested in expanding the use of eDNA as a survey technique, they are sceptical about both its utility (given that information is often li...

Both laboratory and field respirometry are rapidly growing techniques to determine animal performance thresholds. However, replicating protocols to estimate maximum metabolic rate (MMR) between species, populations, and individuals can be difficult, especially in the field. We therefore evaluated seven different exercise treatments-four laboratory...

Adult female Pacific salmon can have higher migration mortality rates than males, particularly at warm temperatures. However, the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon remain a mystery. Given the importance of swimming energetics on fitness, we measured critical swim speed, swimming metabolism, cost of transport, aerobic scope (absolute and factori...

Despite mounting threats to global freshwater and marine biodiversity, including climate change, habitat alteration, overharvesting and pollution, we struggle to know which species are present below the water's surface that are suffering from these stressors. However, the idea that a water sample containing environmental DNA (eDNA) can be screened...