Monday, 30th November Australian Society for Fish Biology & Australian Freshwater Sciences Society Conference 2026

Conference Welcome / House Keeping
Welcome to Country
ASFB Presidents Address
AFSS Presidents Address

ASFB Early Career Travel Award Winner

• Wanted and Unwanted Fish Passage: Addressing Connectivity Challenges in Human-Modified Rivers - Joachim B Bretzel

Gary Jackson - ASFB Historical Society

• The South East Australian Marine Ecosystem Survey: Changes in southeast Australia over 30 years - Richard Little
• Three decades of trophic restructuring in a rapidly warming marine ecosystem - Heidi Pethybridge
• Shaken and stirred: compound climate events reshape tropical marine hotspots - Eva E Plaganyi
• Three decades of change in fish body size and condition in southeast Australia’s rapidly warming seas - Alistair Hobday
• No evidence of decreasing growth rates due to warming in coastal Australian fish - Sarah Willington
•   Size-structured marine ecosystem change around Australia: what can the past tell us about the future? - Julia Blanchard
• Impacts of a Harmful Algal Bloom on Snapper Aggregations in Gulf St Vincent - Ben Scoulding
• Facilitation of coral-reef fish establishment in Sydney:  role of expanding Pocillopora alicia gardens - David J Booth

• Murray River flood facilitates cross-ecosystem trophic subsidies to marine ecosystem - Paul McInerney
• Brown trout avoid poorly oxygenated cold-water refuges, even under extreme heat - Lukian M.D. Adams
• Determining the regionally distinct metabolic scaling of lutruwita/Tasmania’s most targeted recreational fish species. - Nicolas Tsanis-Horniblow
• Towards a unified stream metabolism framework – why energetic dynamics in rivers are misunderstood  - Alina Kuehn
• Small fish, big picture: piloting a latitudinal demographic survey of East Coast Australian syngnathids - Courtney Ede
• Spatial and temporal differences between egg mass abundances of eight caddisfly species - Emily K Armstrong
• From interindividual interactions to multispecies predator aggregations: insights for pelagic conservation - Alicia Burns
• Interactions of fire and grazing on floodplain vegetation dynamics - Jackie L O'Sullivan

• Integrating Metabarcoding into Long-Term Aquatic Macroinvertebrate Monitoring: Comparison with Morphological Identification - Thomas J Mooney
• A regional taxon-independent environmental DNA index for freshwater wetland condition spanning south-western Australia - Angus D Lawrie
• Desiccation 2 DNA – using eDNA to assess diversity of aquatic invertebrates in dry lake systems - Fintan Angel and Courtney Wilkins
• eDNA metabarcoding provides a multi-domain baseline for groundwater microbiomes affected by expanding resource development - Jenny Davis
• Optimising SNP panels for practical genetic monitoring: A case study of the critically endangered Redfin Blue-eye - Elise Furlan
• Rapid molecular screening of shark products for fisheries and conservation monitoring - Nathan Deliveyne
• Deep-water refuges for threatened handfish: integrating ROV and eDNA surveys in Tasmanian Marine Parks - Nicholas Perkins
• Ageing river red gums with an epigenetic clock - Janice L Kerr

• Threshold changes in hydrology influence wetland biodiversity, a 35-year snapshot in a global biodiversity hotspot. - Zachary ZK Kayll
• Murray–Darling Basin - Sustainable Yields 2025 - Kris Kleeman
• Utility of fire-fighting waterpoints as aquatic refugia for conserving freshwater invertebrates in a drying temperate region - Mitchell Haywood
• Has a changing climate altered freshwater fish spawning phenology? A multidecadal investigation of spawning time adaptation and resilience - Alison J King
• Fish community dynamics and diadromous fish passage over two decades of fishway monitoring at the Murray Barrages - Connor Gervais
• Reconnecting the waters: exploring tidal barrage transparency as a mechanism to assist estuarine ecosystem rehabilitation.  - Brenton Zampatti
• Response indicators at short- and long-term scales to inform environmental water management for dryland river floodplain vegetation - Adriana Vega Grau
• An engineer and an ecologist walk into a bar - Rupert Mathwin

• Scaling up Australian genomics: outcomes from the Australian Fish Genomics Initiative - Amy R Tims
• Connectivity and stock structure of swordfish across the indo-pacific - Jorden Aulich
• Mining the hidden DNA from Target-Capture Sequencing: Mitochondrial insights into the phylogeny of wrasses and parrotfishes - Aditya V Swami
• Genome-wide evidence for mixed-species recruitment and extensive regional connectivity in tropical anguillid eels - Kurniawan Kurniawan
• Population Genetic Structure of Southern Sand Flathead (Platycephalus bassensis) Across Tasmania. - Rachel Breslin
• Hidden in plain sight: new populations and genetic structure of the critically endangered freshwater crayfish Euastacus dharawalus - Sarah B. O'Hea Miller
• Applying population genomics to support conservation of the critically endangered red handfish - Thomas Banks
• Integrating fish biology, population genomics and fishery policies for informed management of interjurisdictional multi-species fisheries - Mayuresh Gangal

• Insights from the Kuroshio hotspot: population genetic structures of tropical reef fishes expanding into temperate coasts - Masaaki Sato
• From range extension to contraction? Predicting species redistribution under continued ocean warming - Julia C Sobol
• Contrasting recovery trajectories in two redfish species: a genomic perspective - Sharon Hook
• Using integrated species distribution models to investigate the impacts of reduced fisheries-independent survey effort and the value of commercial fishery data at Heard and McDonald Islands under climate change - Rebecca Konijnenberg
• Can historic heat exposure evoke plasticity of thermal limits? - Candice Kroeker
• Genomic markers of climate susceptibility and resilience across three fisheries species - Sharon E Hook
• Determining impacts and recovery potential of rare and cryptic reef fish following mortality from a harmful algal bloom - Bronwyn Gillanders
• Does climate change the menu: space-for-time comparison of prey availability and dietary composition of an estuarine fish along a rainfall gradient - Chloe Bynon

• Every part of the flow matters: evidence-based decision making in the Martuwarra–Fitzroy - Leah Beesley
• Do commence-to-fill thresholds characterise the hydroperiod of floodplain wetlands effectively? - Michael A Reid
• Hydroperiod versus longitudinal position: what’s more important for the ecological character of floodplain wetlands? - Munique C Reid
• Emergent invertebrate diversity trajectories in intermittently connected floodplain wetlands     - Patrick D Driver
• Early-life thermal bottlenecks: evolutionary potential of embryonic physiology in three-spined stickleback - Amanda K Pettersen
• Chronic hypoxia exposure improves physiological performance in an iconic dryland river fish - Holly A Weston
• The global change in functional diversity of freshwater fishes and its associated conservation concerns - Samuel Ho
• Defining portfolio effects across ecological scales - Ethan D.R. Boock

• Reef fish communities across the full gradient of human use: from open slather to no entry - Daniela M Ceccarelli
• Anthropogenic refugia or industrial risk? Documenting globally significant syngnathid diversity within a highly modified embayment - Glenn I. Moore
• Mapping bycatch risk: Predicting overlap between sea snake habitat and commercial trawl fishing activity. - Nora R Louw
• Development of computer vision models for a visually complex marine system, the giant Australian cuttlefish aggregation - Bethany Jackel
• Estimating orange roughy age using machine learning - Paul Burch
• Scientific survey to assess fish biodiversity and productivity in Marine Reserve around Heard Island and McDonald Islands - Philippe Ziegler
• Exploration of Patagonian toothfish (Dissostichus eleginoides) movement patterns within the Sub-Antarctic region of Heard Island and McDonald Islands (HIMI) - Cara Masere
• Advancing Catch Monitoring with AI: New Results from Australia's Sub-Antarctic Fisheries - Geoff Tuck

• Habitat-specific effects of antidepressant pollution on fish daily activity rhythms in replicated experimental lakes - Jack A Brand
• Predictive modeling of fish growth using oral microbiome responses to individual and combined microplastic and nanoparticle contaminated feed exposures - Mian Adnan
• Current-use pesticides, crabs and climate change: implications for fisheries sustainability and seafood safety - Benjamin CT Gray
• Silent Stressors: Investigating Pesticide-Induced Changes in Fatty Acid Biomarkers and Nutritional Value of Yabbies in the Gwydir River  - Sarah J Mika
• Improving environmental risk assessment methods for micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) - Anne Colville
• Mobilisation of solids and chemicals from urban detritus in stormwater channels and sumps - Manuja Lekammudiyanse
• The fate and mobility of phosphorus in an acid mine drainage polluted system - Peter N Dickens
• A landscape-specific approach to assessing water sustainability using water quality indicators of urban, peri-urban, and rural waterways in the Sydney Basin - Niruban Chakkaravarthy Dhanasekaran

• Close-kin mark-recapture design for key and rebuilding stocks in the Southern and Eastern Scalefish and Shark Fishery - Robin B Thomson
• Sex(XY) markers deliver a new tool for Genomics Based Fishey Management of tuna. - Peter M Grewe
• Updated close-kin mark recapture estimates of a critically endangered shark show the need for integrated solutions to fisheries bycatch. - Toby Patterson
• Using Close-Kin Mark-Recapture (CKMR) to estimate the abundance of the Australiasian White Shark - Rich Hillary
• Using close kin mark-recapture data to inform harvest strategy development under time varying productivity - Pia Bessell-Browne
• The southern bluefin tuna genetic tagging program provides juvenile abundance estimates key to the Management Procedure - Paige Eveson
• Genomic time machines: reconstructing the past to secure the future of fisheries - Adam Miller
• Fish Jenga: Towards metapopulation-informed management of amphidromous fishes - Charlie Hinchliffe

Time: 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: The Brick Factory, 55 Salamanca Place, Hobart, Tasmania