Karen Kidd Lab

Welcome to Karen Kidd's Lab Page

Karen in field

I have been with the Biology Department and Canadian Rivers Institute at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) in Saint John since 2004. I hold a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Chemical Contamination of Food Webs (more information on this program can be found at www.chairs.gc.ca) and the main focus of the research we do in my lab is on understanding the effects of human activities on freshwater ecosystems. We work on lakes and rivers impacted by industrial, agricultural and municipal effluents, on remote systems contaminated solely by long range atmospheric transport and deposition, and on whole system experiments at the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) and at the Long-Term Ecological Wetlands Area (LEWA). The two studies at the ELA in northwestern Ontario are examining the effects of the estrogen used in birth control pills and the impacts of freshwater rainbow trout cage culture on freshwater food webs. At the newly-established LEWA at CFB Gagetown in New Brunswick, we are treating ponds with herbicides and fertilizers to understand the effects of these two stressors on wetland communities. In New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, we have several projects to understand the accumulation of mercury in circumneutral and acidified lake and stream ecosystems, why fish from some waters are higher in mercury than others, and the impacts of municipal and industrial effluents on fish and food webs in the Saint John River. We are also researching how nutrients in agricultural runoff affect the health of stream systems in New Brunswick, and the fate and effects of therapeutants used in salmon aquaculture on marine invertebrates.

FACILITIES

We moved into a new Canadian Rivers Institute building in 2006 that includes state-of-the-art wet and dry labs and offices for faculty and students. Click here for more details on the equipment and analyses supporting my lab's ecotoxicology research.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM 2007, 2008 and 2009

In 2007, my colleagues and I published the following paper that has received a lot of coverage by the media. Some of this is highlighted below along with a few other notable events or activities.

Kidd, K.A., P.J. Blanchfield, K.H. Mills, V.P. Palace, R.E. Evans, J.M. Lazorchak and R. Flick. 2007. Collapse of a fish population following exposure to a synthetic estrogen. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(21):8897-8901, doi:/10.1073/pnas.0609568104

May 2007

Sex-Changing Chemicals Can Wipe Out Fish, Study Shows

by John Roach
for National Geographic News

"Tiny amounts of the estrogen used in birth control pills can cause wild fish populations to collapse, according to a new study." Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/05/070521-sex-fish.html

January, 2008

Discover Magazine's Top 100 Science Stories of 2007

Wastewater Decimates Minnows

by Megan Mansell Williams

Discover Cover