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My name is Andrew Constable. I am a theme leader in the Australian Antarctic science
program responsible for studying Southern Ocean ecosystems and that theme has a number
of elements. The first element is to understand how southern ocean ecosystems are responding
to climate change. The second thing is to look at how do we conserve whales, albatross
and other species like that? And then a big responsibility is how do you manage fisheries
in the Southern Ocean so as they remain ecologically sustainable? One of the main parts of our
work is to do field work in the Southern Ocean. That involves going to sea on ships for maybe
up to three months at a time and what we try to do there is we are sampling the animals
and plants in the ocean to better understand how they work with the ocean, what sort of
impacts changes in the ocean might have and in particular what things might happen as
a result of climate change. The last thing that we do is we try to look at undertaking
laboratory studies that help us better understand the exact mechanisms of impact. That is how
we know about the effects of acidification on krill, for example. That was done here
at the Australian Antarctic Division. For example we know the Southern Ocean ecosystem
is becoming more acidic which there are some animals at the bottom end of the food chain,
they're not doing so well. So krill, for example, their embryos don't survive very well in a
super acidic environment. One of the big challenges is being able to do science at a sufficiently
large scale, so operating ships or being able to sample in many different places that give
us very good information that we can feed into our models and basically help management
make the right decisions. The more we are able to forecast what is going to happen in
the future, the more that we can adjust our management practices and the more that we
can make better decisions in advance and make sure that fisheries remain ecologically sustainable.
I'm never bored. It's a fantastic place to work, the work is very challenging, one of
the great things about this work is the people that I work with. It is those partnerships
that matter. That's what makes the science very enjoyable and we can overcome the challenges
together. In the end it will be a community enterprise to overcome these challenges and
to better understand what we have in the future.