Devices & Methods
Instruments and protocols developed to measure fish performance at scale
Manuscript In Review
Laser-Timed Burst Swimming Tunnel
Burst swimming — the explosive, anaerobic sprint used for predator escape and prey capture — is one of the most ecologically relevant performance traits in fish, but historically difficult to measure with precision and throughput. I designed and built a Raspberry Pi–powered swimming tunnel instrumented with laser break-beam sensors that automatically times multiple burst performance metrics with millisecond precision.
The system can process dozens of fish per day, across temperatures and species, and has already been applied to study predator–prey thermal dynamics in Chinook salmon (McInturf et al. 2022).
Manuscript In Review
Thermal Preference Arena
Understanding where fish choose to be — not just where they can survive — is critical for predicting habitat use under warming. This thermal preference arena creates a stable thermal gradient within a single tank, allowing fish to behaviorally thermoregulate and reveal their preferred temperatures through movement and position.
Developed and deployed at McMurdo Station, Antarctica to characterize thermal preferences in Trematomus bernacchii and T. pennellii — revealing behavioral evidence of niche differentiation between sympatric species that was not apparent from physiology alone (Naslund et al., in review).
In Development
Temperature Monitoring System
Continuous, high-resolution temperature data from rivers and experimental systems is foundational to ecophysiological research — but commercial solutions are often expensive, proprietary, or poorly suited to the spatial and temporal resolution needed for physiological studies.
This ongoing project develops low-cost, open-source temperature logging hardware and software for deployment in both laboratory systems and field environments. Designed to integrate directly with the physiological performance frameworks used across my research program.