Question: why did you want a job with marine creatures and what advice would you give someone who was thinking about a job like yours?

Ozge Ozkaya answered on 14 Jun 2011:

I would say that I am more a molecular biologist than a marine biologist. I always wanted to study biology and that’s what I did at University, I specialised in molecular biology and genetics later on. I am using a marine creature (krill) in my current project because we are interested in circadian (circa=almost diem=a day) rhythms, and krill migrate up and down the water column in a 24 h cycle. (They come to the surface of the ocean in huge swarms at night to feed and they migrate back to the ocen floor during the day to avoid visual predators). Our lab has shown that this behaviour is under the control of the circadian clock. Krill can teach us a lot about the clock at the poles because the species I am working on is polar. Our clock is “entrained” by light, i.e when we go to america or australia and that night becomes day and day becomes night, we are badly affected but a few days later we readjust to the new light regime = we re-entrain. But what happens at the poles is that in winter you get constant darkness and in summer constant light. How does the clock cope with this, is it even an advabtage evolutionarily to have a clock at the poles? Maybe it is used to synchronise the individuals in a huge swarm???

My advice to you would be to study as hard as you can, this will always be an advantage for you, keep curious and don’t be dishartened, sometimes things don’t happen easily but you can make them happen if you really want to:)…Oh and this is the case for anything not just in my job.