Paul Marmer

Paul Marmer recently returned to Canada after spending a year at the National University of Mongolia (2007-08) doing field work on the presence of endophyte-infected forage grasses. These microscopic fungi are called endophytes because they live entirely inside their host grass. The fungus can make the grass poisonous for grazing animals, resulting in reduced productivity of livestock and increased mortality of both livestock and herbivorous wildlife. The grass benefits in different ways from the fungus. Examples of benefits include not being eaten because animals learn to avoid infected grass, as well as increased drought tolerance. Paul first went to Mongolia as a Biology Master’s student in 2006, to study the interactions among livestock herders, grazing animals, vegetation and water resources as part of the Sustainable Water in Mongolia (SWiM) project. Future climate change projections indicate that lakes and rivers in Mongolia will continue to dry up. The possibility of increased levels of endophyte-infected grasses in response to increased drought may pose a threat to traditional herder livelihoods and livestock production.

Paul is in the process of transferring from the MSc to the PhD programme in the Biology Department at York University, where he is supervised by Professor Dawn Bazely. He has decided to extend his Mongolian research and ask similar questions in the Northwest Territories as part of the IPY GAPS project. This work on the prevalence of fungal endophytes in wide-ranging arctic grasses builds upon previous research by Dawn Bazely’s group in Sweden, Norway, Scotland and Nunavut, which found that endophyte-infected grass plants are not very abundant in arctic regions. Paul will collect grasses from four communities along the proposed Mackenzie Valley Gas Pipeline route to determine patterns of endophyte infection. He is interested in understanding what sort of impacts oil and gas development and climate change may have on the movement of grasses with endophyte infection. These grasses form an important part of the diet of many northern herbivorous animals.