ECR Spotlight – Benjamin Dupuis

Benjamin Dupuis

How did you become interested in biology?

I grew up in the countryside, so I've always been exposed to nature. But I think what triggered my interest in studying wildlife was watching Jurassic Park and playing Pokémon when I was 5–6 years old. Both allowed me to ask and think about my first biology questions about evolution, biodiversity extinction and animal behaviour. From that point, I started to pay more attention to wildlife around us, which we often fail to notice. Then in middle and high school, I was lucky enough to have brilliant biology teachers who started to make me understand that studying and understanding wildlife can be a job. As I was starting to study biology in college, I also started wildlife photography, which was a way for me to be able to see animals in the wild for real (i.e. not just a quick encounter of a few seconds, but really watching animal behaviour in the wild).

Describe your scientific journey and your current research focus

When I started studying biology in college, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to focus on. I already had an interest in studying animal behaviour in the wild, but it was still quite vague. At the end of the second year of my Bachelor’s degree, I had to do a 7-week internship. I remember sending tons of applications without much success, until I got accepted to work on a great tit monitoring program around Paris. I was trying to study the effect of urbanization on the personality of great tits. This was the first time I realized the complexity of anthropogenic activities effects on wildlife, beyond biology crisis extinction numbers. Since then, I have begun to be particularly interested in understanding how global changes and anthropogenic activities affect animal behaviour, and how as a scientist, I could inform conservation and decision makers. During the first year of my Master’s, I was therefore looking at an internship related to that topic, with no specific interest in terms of species but an attraction towards extreme environments like tropical and polar areas. I ended up working on detecting interactions between northern fulmars and fisheries in the North Atlantic with small animal-borne dataloggers. Discovering this tool was quite a revolution in my scientific journey; it was a way to access previously hidden data on where or when an animal was moving and what it was doing. I also discovered the world of seabird and marine predators, which I realized I knew so little about. Since then, my research focus is to use biologging to study animal movement and inform conservation. In particular, I mostly study marine predators from polar and sub-polar areas.

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

For every animal, understanding the amount of energy it expands and gains is crucial as it will affect all steps of its life. When an animal finds less food in its environment, it reduces its energetic gain, and therefore the amount of energy it can expend to move, grow or reproduce, for instance. Yet it is very difficult to estimate energy gained and expended by an individual. Most common methods in biology are either too costly or too difficult to implement in the wild. It would be like trying to make all your family note down what they eat, and perform an endurance test every day. Not easy, right? Well, in this study we wanted to do the same, except it's not your relatives but penguins in the middle of Antarctica. Luckily, technology can help us. Nowadays, anyone with a smartwatch can get an estimate of how many calories they have burnt after a run. We can do the same with penguins by attaching the same kind of sensor on their back while they go to sea. In this study, we show that by using only a sensor recording every second the depth of Adélie penguins, we can estimate how much energy it expends and how long it hunts for fish and krill. Such sensors have been commonly used on marine predators since the 1990s. This novel method will allow us to understand how Antarctica's changing environment can affect Adélie penguin energy expenditure and intake.

Why did you choose JEB to publish your paper?

I had positive feedback from other researchers in my lab regarding the speed and quality of review from JEB. The format-free submission process was also important. Moreover, I think it is important to support and work with journals published by not-for-profit organisations, like JEB, to ensure a durable and fair scientific publishing system. JEB also emphasises the work of early career researchers with initiatives such as these ECR Spotlights and ECR grants, which can be of great help to a lot of PhD students and young postdocs.

What is the most important piece of equipment for your research, what does it do and what question did it help you address?

The most important piece of equipment for my research is the dataloggers we deploy on Adélie penguins. These smartwatch-like devices are really revolutionary as they have allowed researchers to study the behaviour of diving or flying animals in remote places of the world where it wasn't possible before. These loggers can record various types of data to address a lot of questions on, for instance, the feeding tactics of these individuals, their wintering habits, their interactions with fisheries, social structures, etc.

With technological progress, these loggers are also getting smaller and smaller, while being able to record more and more data, which is also crucial when it comes to ethics and limiting the impacts of such deployments on animals.

What is your favourite animal, and why?

It won't be very surprising for this one but I must say the Adélie penguin. I've had the chance of going twice into the field to work with these little guys and they are really special. They are like the hooligans or bulldogs of Antarctica, as they often fight amongst themselves for pebbles to build their nest. But they do not stop there, when they go at-sea with some emperor penguin chicks beside them, you can always see few of them going around and just kicking and bothering these majestic emperor chicks, which are twice their size. During the breeding season, they also need to defend their nest from skuas that try to feed upon their eggs or chicks. I remember once seeing one Adélie grabbing the leg of a skua trying to eat its eggs. The skua started to fly away, but the Adélie just hung onto its leg and only let go after a few seconds when it was ∼2 m high. That's the only time I’ve seen a penguin almost flying. Around the station, the contrast between these fierce Adélie and the noble emperors is quite striking and you can only love them for that.

What's next for you?

I'm now entering the last year of my PhD, and after that I would like to continue as a postdoc to work on how biologging can help us gather information on how wildlife is coping with global climate change and anthropogenic activities.