New paper in Aquaculture!
July 28, 2023
New paper out in Aquaculture this week!
A cautionary tale regarding how we parameterize and use ecological carrying capacity indices in bivalve aquaculture for management and eco-certification.
The take home message is that simple approaches to estimating key ecosystem turnover rates can result in drastically miscalculating indices for classifying the “sustainability” of an aquaculture operation.
We caution against aquaculture sustainability thresholds based on these indices and stress that system complexity must be accounted for.
Read the article for free HERE!
New paper in Fisheries Research!
June 1, 2023
New paper out today in Fisheries Research, once again from MSc student Tamara Ledoux!
This chapter studied the reproductive ecology of soft-shell clams in Kouchibouguac National Park.
The main take-home findings:
- There appears to be one spawning event that occurs in late June-early July.
- The shell length at which one would predict 50% of the soft-shell clam population to be sexually mature in KNP is ~40mm, regardless of biological sex.
- Sex ratios in KNP deviate substantially from any other published sex ratio for this species; sex ratios in the park were almost always >2:1 F:M (exceeding 3:1 F:M in some spots). This is super weird – previous publications all indicate 1:1 as the norm for this species (sometimes male skewed in contaminated areas). This was not at all expected and we still don’t know why it is…
- There is a curious absence of smaller males (25-35 mm) from the population compared to females (also unexpected and not yet explainable); the absence of these smaller males does not fully explain skewed sex ratios
The paper is free to read HERE!
This work also sets the stage for current MSc student (Sarah Harrison, co-supervised with Heather Hunt) who will be exploring spatial variation in this reproductive ecology across the sGSL from northern NB, to the northern shore of NS and across PEI.
New paper in JEMBE!
May 12, 2023
New paper out today in JEMBE from MSc student Tamara Ledoux!
What happens to sub-legal sized soft-shell clams after they’re fished and tossed back onto the sediment? Can they reburrow?
In our field experiments at Kouchibouguac National Park, Parks Canada, we found that they can reburrow, but they are slow, and the environmental conditions that they are tossed back to can greatly influence reburrowing!
Read the article for free HERE!
A MASSIVE congrats to Tamara Ledoux on successfully defending her Masters thesis!
April 24, 2023
Huge congratulations to Tam Ledoux for successfully defending her Masters thesis from the Département de biologie at l’Université de Moncton!
Tam’s thesis centered on the fisheries ecology of soft-shell clams in Kouchibouguac National Park, exploring the fate of sub-legal, fished clams after they are tossed back to the sediment by fishers, along with the reproductive ecology of clams in the park.
Alongside already submitting her two thesis chapters for publication (one which was accepted with minor revisions this morning!), Tam also managed to publish her undergraduate honours research earlier this year.
Getting to supervise your first grad student from start to finish is incredibly rewarding, but getting to do it with an absolute rockstar of a student is icing on the cake!
An incredible amount of work and dedication. I could not be prouder!
Bravo Tamara!!!
Congrats to MSc student Tamara Ledoux on her first paper!
April 6, 2023
A huge congratulations goes out to master’s student Tamara Ledoux on her first scientific publication! The paper, published last month in Frontiers in Marine Science, is based on work she conducted during her BSc honours research at the Université de Moncton regarding the impacts of anthropogenic sounds on the behaviour and physiology of eastern oysters.
Read the freely-accessible paper HERE!
Congrats Tam!!
New paper in PLOS Biology!
February 7, 2023
Back in February 2022, Jeff and colleagues (Josefin Sundin, Tim Clark, and Fredrik Jutfelt) published a paper describing an extreme “decline effect” in studies testing for ocean acidification effects on fish behaviour. Philip Munday recently reanalyzed those data, claiming that his “reanalysis shows there is not an extreme decline effect.”
In this paper, Jeff et al. reply to Dr. Munday’s analysis and strongly reject his claim. Read the freely-accessible paper HERE!
Jeff C. Clements, Ph.D. 