ECR Spotlight – Grace Sutton

Grace Sutton

Describe your scientific journey and your current research focus

I began my scientific journey at Deakin University, where I completed my honours degree in the foraging behaviour of little penguins. I remained at Deakin for my PhD but commenced a ‘shared’ PhD arrangement between Deakin and La Rochelle University (France), which enabled me to work on a similar topic to my honours work but across a range of penguin species. I was fortunate enough to spend time working on penguins in Australia, South Africa and the Kerguelen Islands (a French sub-Antarctic island) before the COVID-19 pandemic occurred. Over 2020–2022, I worked as a research assistant, where I tracked a number of seabird (including gannets) and fur seal species in Bass Strait to look at their movements in relation to a proposed off-shore wind farm.

After many years of working in isolated locations, chasing after and catching wild animals, I am now working as a research fellow in the Centre of Future Landscapes at La Trobe University in a completely different field! Here, I have been doing various spatial analyses to identify natural capital in agricultural landscapes. In this role, I have been able to apply the statistical skills I built during my PhD (machine learning, coding) on an entirely new topic. It has stretched me further than I thought myself capable of, but I have enjoyed working in applied research where I can see how the research I am a part of is directly beneficial to many.

How would you explain the main finding of your paper to a member of the public?

Understanding the energy use of species is fundamental to understanding their ecology. In this paper, I calculated the amount of energy that an Australasian gannet uses day to day. I used two methods, one that is the ‘gold standard’ (i.e. highly accurate) but invasive and time consuming in that it requires injections and blood samples while the other method is less invasive and uses just a small tracker attached to the tail. We did this to see whether we could determine a relationship between the two methods and we found a strong positive relationship between them. This means that the less invasive method is a good alternative to the invasive and time consuming one and could be used in the future to reduce effort and ultimately reduce the stress for individual birds as the less invasive method requires less handling and less stressful procedures.

What are the potential implications of this finding for your field of research, and is there anything that you learned during this study that you wish you had known sooner?

The implications are that we can use the less invasive method – which involves placing a small ‘Fitbit’ device on the animal – to estimate the energy they expend over time. This finding is valuable for future studies because it reduces the need for invasive methods and allows us to track the animals’ movements to build a budget of how much effort they put in versus how much they gain. Measures of energy expenditure are important to quantify because the environment (especially the marine environment) is highly dynamic, with resource availability changing constantly. So, finding non-invasive ways to measure energy expenditure over crucial periods of an animal’s life can help to shed light on their ecology as well as the overall fitness of the species. What I wish I had known: gannets spend a lot of time preening and resting, behaviours which are difficult to account for and surprisingly consume a lot of energy!

Which part of this research project was the most rewarding/challenging?

I always find working with the animals the most rewarding and challenging part of the job. These are wild birds, so they're not cute and cuddly and if you're not careful they can injure you quite badly with their razor-sharp bills. The statistical analysis components are also rewarding when you find strong patterns (positive or negative) because you've spent so much time and effort collecting the data and it's going to be able to tell you something about the species that we didn't previously know.

Are there any important historical papers from your field that have been published in JEB?

There are a range of previous studies relating to my research that have been published in JEB, you only need to use the word ‘doubly labelled water’ to find them. These have paved the way for later research by showing a ‘proof of concept’ of the validation methodology and have shown the need for species-specific validations to be done, which is exactly what our study has accomplished for Australasian gannets.

Are there any modern-day JEB papers that you think will be the classic papers of 2123? If so, which paper, and how will it pave the way for future research?

I can only hope this one will be! In all seriousness, it is extremely difficult to narrow it down to a single article as JEB covers a wide range of important topics and themes. I think if I could pull out a common thread, future (and current) research is about tackling the problems of today in a collaborative and accessible way. The Commentary paper by Roche et al., ‘Paths towards greater consensus building in experimental biology’ (2022; doi:10.1242/jeb.243559), is a good synthesis of these ideas and includes a summary of accessibility of data and code in a range of journals with a focus on climate change. I can only hope that by 2123, all science practices are centered on FAIR (Finable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable) principles to encourage consensus on global issues.

If you had unlimited funding, what question in your research field would you most like to address?

If I had unlimited funding, I would build a mega lab of amazing multi-disciplinary researchers to investigate the life history patterns of marine and terrestrial species that use Bass Strait (south-eastern Victoria). I would like to understand the migratory movements of winter migrants over Bass Strait (terrestrial species) as well as the long-term foraging behaviour of marine species in this region. I'd like this to involve a whole range of tracking, acoustics, oceanography and other spatial datasets to provide information at a range of scales. This is something that would greatly inform on the overall health of this rapidly changing, but incredibly diverse ecosystem.

What changes do you think could improve the lives of early-career researchers, and what would make you want to continue in a research career?

I think stability is incredibly important for a person to be able to give 100% to their current role. Providing ECRs with this (i.e. in the form of longer-term contracts or opportunities for permanent positions, and better parental leave schemes for contract employees) would be a huge improvement from the current state of play.

What's next for you?

I am currently finishing off a contract at La Trobe University and hoping that it will be extended. Through this contract, I have spent the last 18 months working on developing ways to measure natural capital at the farm-scale which has been an exciting shift in direction. I've really enjoyed the new challenge of working in the applied science space. I'll also be taking some parental leave with a baby coming in January, so I'll dedicate the first half of 2024 to learning how to parent.