Short bio

I am a PhD candidate specialised in marine biology, ecology and conservation, with a particular interest in investigating anthropogenic effects on marine mammals using data and samples from stranded and bycaught individuals. I have a BSc in ‘Biology of the Environment’ from the University of Nantes (France) and a MSc in ‘Oceanography and Marine Environments’ from the Pierre and Marie Curie University – Sorbonne Universities (France). Before starting my PhD in Vigo at the end of 2019, I worked with different entities such as universities, institutes, governmental agencies, stranding networks and whale-watching industries in various countries: the Netherlands, Canada, Ireland, France, Iceland, Scotland and Belgium. My PhD thesis is entitled ‘Current and historical threats to dolphins in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean’ and I am supervised by Dr Graham Pierce (IIM-CSIC). My PhD is funded by a Marie Sk?odowska-Curie scholarship, and is part of the SeaChanges network (https://sites.google.com/york.ac.uk/seachanges/), which manages 15 PhDs related to the interface between marine biology and zooarchaeology. The aim of my PhD is to study the current and historical ecology of common dolphins (Delphinus delphis) in the Northeast Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea to investigate the drivers behind the different population trajectories in both regions. I am focusing my work on threats potentially responsible for these differences: direct killings in the past, bycatch, food depletion and health related issues. To do so, I am using a combination of historical documents and museum collections, data and samples from stranding networks, as well as samples collected on free-ranging dolphins, to perform stable isotopes analyses, microbiome analyses, and ecological modelling.