Mariyanuge Dileepa Samika Thanuksha de Croos, defended his Ph.D. thesis
Mariyanuge Dileepa Samika Thanuksha de Crooswas was a UNU-FTP fellow in the year 2007. He was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on October 5, 1974. He received his MSc degree in Aquaculture and Fisheries management in 2004 at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. For the past three years, he has carried out his Ph.D. research at the Institute of Biology, University of Iceland, and been supported by the United Nations University – Fisheries Training Programme and Icelandic International Development Agency (ICEIDA). His research activity included planning and implementing a sampling survey for identifying the stock structure of the main shrimp species and their fisheries off the west coast of Sri Lanka.
Dileepa's thesis is in the field of fisheries and population biology of Penaeid shrimps. Penaeid shrimps are an important source of livelihood for many artisanal fishers in the developing countries in the tropical and subtropical regions. An important prerequisite of sustainable harvest of species is an understanding of its population structure. The thesis addresses the stock structure of four major commercial shrimp species in the coastal waters of Sri Lanka. The stock identification was based both on genetic variation in mtDNA sequences and reproductive traits.
Opponents were Dr.Michaela Aschan, Professor at the University of Tromsö, Norway and Dr. Christophe Pampoulie, a research scientist at the Marine Research Institute, Reykjavik. The Ph.D. advisors of Dileepa de Croos are Dr.Snæbjörn Pálsson Associate Professor at the Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, Dr. Gunnar Stefansson, Professor at the Faculty of Physical Sciences, both at University of Iceland, and Dr. Lorna Taylor, ecosystem modeller.