Grant: Engage Grants Program

Homarus is a non-profit research and development subsidiary company of the Maritime Fishermen's Union(MFU). Its mandate is to develop tools for the better management and conservation of the lobster resource inour coastal waters. Recent projects led by Homarus were aimed at understanding the effects of sublethalconcentrations of contaminant exposure on the health, growth and fitness of juvenile lobsters. The results fromthese studies suggest that conclusions based solely on lethal toxicity assays could be misleading and neglectsublethal effects of contaminants on marine organisms. The company is now interested in using physiologicalgrowth and stress markers to assess the effects of contaminants on lobsters. The objective of this project is todevelop a suite of physiological indicators of stress and growth performance in lobster larvae exposed tovarious conditions including sublethal contaminant exposition. We hypothesize that the exposition of lobstersto deltamethrin will affect protein metabolism and protein oxidation in lobster larvae. We will expose theanimals to four concentrations of deltamethrin for a period of 14 days. We will then measure the levels ofubiquitinated proteins and 20S proteasome activity as markers of protein degradation. We will also measureTBARS and protein carbonyl as markers of protein oxidation. Finally, we will measure the concentration ofheat shock proteins as a marker of physiological stress. It is expected that some of the measured markers willstrongly respond to the treatments and could be used to detect the exposition to deltamethrin in wild-caughtlobster larvae. Knowledge gained from this project will have important implications for the sustainablemanagement of the lobster resource in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence region and for the regional economy.