Mason Stothart

Biography

Mason joined the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, at the University of Calgary as a PhD student in January 2018 working under the supervision of Dr. Jocelyn Poissant in the Department of Ecosystem and Public Health.  Mason has a MSc in Comparative Animal Physiology and a BScH in Wildlife Biology & Conservation, from the University of Guelph.

For his doctoral thesis, Mason is studying the drivers of intestinal bacterial community variation in free-living feral horses, and the fitness consequences of this variation for equine hosts. Many host-bacteria interactions in the intestinal tract are commensalisms or mutualistic, however some microbes are overtly pathogenic, while other, regularly benign symbionts can slip into parasitism depending on the environmental and physiological context. Notably, the intestinal microbiome comprises a large portion of the biological community with which intestinal parasitic nematodes interact. Therefore, understanding parasitism in the wild requires knowledge of the three-way interaction between host, microbiome, and parasite.

Publications

Greyson-Gaito, C., Bartley, T., Cottenie, K., Jarvis, W., Newman, A.E.M, and Stothart, M.R. (2020). Into the wild: microbiome transplant studies need broader ecological reality. Proc. R. Soc. B. 287(1921):1-9

Stothart, M.R., Palme, R., Newman, A.E.M. (2019) It’s what’s on the inside that counts: stress physiology and the bacterial microbiome of a wild urban mammal. Proc. R. Soc. B 286:20192111.

Rivkin, L.R., Santangelo, J.S., Alberti, M., Aronson, M.F.J., de Keyzer, C.W., Diamond, S.E., Fortin, M., Frazee, L.J., Gorton, A.J., Hendry, A.P., Liu, Y., Losos, J.B., MacIvor, J.S., Martin, R.A., McDonnell, M.J., Miles, L.S., Munshi‐South, J., Ness, R.W., Newman, A.E.M., Stothart, M.R., Theodorou, P., Thompson, K.A., Verrelli, B.C., Whitehead, A., Winchell, K.M. & Johnson, M.T.J. (2019). A roadmap for research in urban evolutionary ecology. Evolutionary Applications 12:384-398.

Stothart, M.R., Elliott, K.H., Wood, T., Hatch, S.A., and Speakman, J.R. (2016). Counting calories in cormorants: dynamic body acceleration predicts daily energy expenditure in pelagic cormorants. Journal of Experimental Biology 219:2192-2200.

Stothart, M.R., Bobbie, C.B., Schulte-Hostedde, A.I., Boonstra, R., Palme, R., Mykytczuk, N.C.S., and Newman A.E.M. (2016). Stress and the microbiome: linking glucocorticoids to bacterial community dynamics in wild red squirrels. Biology Letters 12: 20150875.

Awards

NSERC CGS Vanier

Eye’s High Doctoral Recruitment Scholarship

Alberta Innovates Graduate Student Top-Up

Izaak Walton Killam Pre-Doctoral Scholarship