Elementar, our IRMS instrumentation partner, has devoted an instalment of their “Customer Spotlight” to our ( Gilles Lepoint and I) work at University of Liège’s stable isotope facility. We’re thrilled and humbled to stand there among big names in isotope analysis and biogeochemistry! You can read the article here.
Today was my first day as a research scientist at the Deep Environment Laboratory of Ifremer Brittany, Brest, France. I will miss my colleagues from University of Liège (although I strongly hope to carry on working with them), but I’m looking forward to new challenges and research opportunities as I now move into deep-sea research…
New paper in collaboration with our Brazilian colleagues! This one is entitled “ Use of multielement stable isotope ratios to investigate ontogenetic movements of Micropogonias furnieri in a tropical Brazilian estuary” and was lead by Carolina Pizzochero. We used stable isotope ratios of C, N and S to track habitat use by whitemouth croakers (a commercially important fish from Southeastern Brazil) throughout their life. It’s the lead author’s first paper, so congrats Carolina!
Our paper entitled “ Carbon, Nitrogen and Sulphur isotopic fractionation in captive juvenile hooded seal (Cystophora cristata ): application for diet analysis” just came out in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry. We took advantage of a rare opportunity to analyse tissues from Arctic seals raised on controlled diets to investigate diet-consumer isotopic fractionation in multiple tissues, and compare experimentally measured trophic enrichment factors to outputs from SIDER, a recently published model.
I just spent the week in Leuven for the excellent 12th Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research Biology Symposium. Between a talk, a poster, a session to chair, scheduled project meetings and countless great presentations and fortuitous discussions, it has been a busy, productive, and very enjoyable week!
[caption id="attachment_381” align="aligncenter” width="2048”] University of Liège’s delegation at the SCAR Biology Symposium in Leuven[/caption]
On 15 & 16/05, I took part in the 1st Workshop of the Southern Ocean Observing System (SOOS) “West Antarctic Peninsula Regional Working Group”, held at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge (UK). It’s been a pleasure to attend the many high-quality talks, to participate in the discussions, and to discover the mythic BAS offices!
[caption id="attachment_387” align="aligncenter” width="2048”] If you’re into that sort of stuff, here’s a great opportunity to play “Find Waldo”…[/caption]
Gilles Lepoint and I are just back from lovely Utrecht (The Netherlands), where we attended the 2017 Symposium of the Benelux Association of Stable Isotope Scientists. As always, it was a very convivial meeting, and a great opportunity to meet with peopled involved in IRMS instrumentation development. I gave a talk about our research on impacts of changes in sea ice cover on Antarctic Benthic communities. Next year, Gilles and I will happily host the symposium in Liège!
Bruno Frédérich and I co-first authored a paper about resource segregation in relatively poorly known nocturnal fishes from coral reefs in Madagascar. It’s open access, so go read it on Zoological Studies’ website: Comparative Feeding Ecology of Cardinalfishes (Apogonidae) at Toliara Reef, Madagascar
Our paper about differences in niche width in populations of fin whales from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and the implications for conservation biology just came out in Marine Environmental Research. It’s entitled “ Isotopic niches of fin whales from the Mediterranean Sea and the Celtic Sea (North Atlantic)", it was lead by Krishna Das, and I was in charge of the isotopic niche modelling. Read it here: http://hdl.handle.net/2268/208463
Our latest paper, entitled “ Isotopic half-life and enrichment factor in two species of European freshwater fish larvae: an experimental approach", just came out in the last issue of Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry. For this paper, we set up a lab experiment to measure isotopic turnover and trophic fractionation of carbon and nitrogen in larvae two species of common freshwater fish from river Meuse, the chub (Squalius cephalus) and the roach (Rutilus rutilus).