Elementar celebrated the launch of its new software, ArDB (Analytical Results Database), with a competition to win a two-year licence. The challenge was to explain how one plans to use such a tool to develop new research in under a 100 words. I entered and was selected among the winners. I’m very thankful and thrilled to use this software to help developing our upcoming open database of stable isotope ratios in deep-sea organisms.
From 17 to 22/11/2018, the “ Lipids in the ocean: Structure, function, ecological role and applications” conference took place in Brest. It was a pretty intensive week, starting with workshops about sample preservation and storage; best practices to analyse lipid data; and how to couple lipid markers with stable isotopes (co-hosted by yours truly). After that, we had three days of very diverse talks. While exhausting, the conference was very rewarding.
From 14 to 16/11/2018, I participated at the 3rd French colloquium on biology and ecology of chemosynthesis-based ecosystems (CONNECT 3), hosted by the Roscoff biological station. It’s been a great opportunity to meet the national community of hydrothermal vents and cold seeps researchers, and to present our lab’s latest results.
[caption id="attachment_619” align="alignnone” width="1024”]Roscoff on a sunny winter day[/caption]
Our new paper is out in Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology. We used stable isotopes to show that Baltic seagrass meadows offer a stable environment to macrofauna, dampening seasonal changes in the food web when compared with bare sediments. It is another product of the fruitful collaboration between IOPAN (Gdansk, Poland) and ULiège (Liège, Belgium).
You can read the full story here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jembe.2018.10.004
[caption id="attachment_608” align="alignnone” width="807”]Conceptual model synthesising trophic links in summer and winter, in both unvegetated sediments and seagrass meadows.
I’m just back from the IsoEcol 2018 conference in Viña del Mar. As always with IsoEcol, it’s been a fantastic occasion to interact with leading experts in isotope ecology in a friendly and laid-back way, and to present our newest results to the isotope community. It was my third IsoEcol, and it’s been good to catch up with old friends and colleagues, and to make a few new ones. It’s been an inspiring week, choke-full of amazing talks and posters.
Our new paper is out in Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science. We combined stable isotopes and gut contents to investigate how much macrofauna living in Neptune grass detritus accumulations actually feeds on dead seagrass fragments. Our results indicate that detritus is an important food source for primary consumers, and that detrital carbon is transferred to higher trophic levels through predation. These results complement those obtained by Mascart et al for meiofauna living in the same environment.
Our newest paper just came out in food webs. We used stable isotopes and fatty acid trophic markers to show that, despite the “black box” approach often applied to meiofaunal consumers, there is actually considerable interspecific differences in the feeding habits of copepods living in Mediterranean seagrass detritus. Moreover, our results show that some copepods could (quite unexpectedly) rely on seagrass detritus for their nutrition. Read more at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fooweb.2018.e00086
This is the last paper from Thibaud Mascart’s PhD thesis, and it comes out quite timely as Thibaud now transitions into a less academic career.
On 19 and 20/04/2018, University of Liège hosted the 2018 symposium edition of the Benelux Association of Stable Isotope Scientists (BASIS). Gilles Lepoint and I acted as local conveners. Although it has been two exhausting days, we are very happy with how things went. Turnout was very good for the conference (over 100 attendees), the atmosphere was friendly and the scientific level of the presentations was excellent. The symposium provided many opportunities for interactions between stable isotope users and people actually involved in instrumentation development.
A new paper in collaboration with our Polish colleagues, entitled “ Modification of benthic food web structure by recovering seagrass meadows, as revealed by trophic markers and mixing models” just came out in Ecological Indicators.
For this one, we combined stable isotopes and fatty acid trophic markers in a quantitative mixing model, to evaluate how presence of seagrass meadows influences food webs in the coastal Baltic Sea. You can read the paper here: http://hdl.
Our paper entitled “ Similar levels of trophic and functional diversity within damselfish assemblages across Indo‐Pacific coral reefs", lead by Laura Gajdzik, just came out in Functional Ecology. Using stable isotopes and functional diversity indices, we showed that patterns of ecological diversity are consistent in distinct damselfish assemblages found in very different Indo-Pacific coral reefs. Very happy to see this one out after a long, demanding and bumpy reviewing process… Congratulations, Laura!