Hey! I am Etienne, an Ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. I study how long-lived animals (right now: albatrosses, Antarctic toothfish and dolphins) cope with a changing and increasingly unpredictable environment, and how we can recognise a population in trouble before its numbers begin to fall.
Long-lived species respond to environmental change on two timescales. Within a lifetime, individuals adjust: surviving longer or shorter, breeding earlier or later, investing more or less in their young. Across generations, populations can gradually adapt. I work to understand both responses, and whether together they are enough to keep these animals viable as the climate shifts.
These are among the hardest species to study: wide-ranging, long-lived, and largely out of sight for most of their lives. Rather than observing them directly, I reconstruct their fate from the evidence they leave behind: strandings, the growth layers laid down in a fish’s ear bone, and the life histories of individuals followed for thirty or forty years via capture-recapture. The work is about turning that fragmentary evidence into a reliable account of how a population is faring, and into early warnings conservation can act on in time.
I trained in France, at Sorbonne Université and La Rochelle Université, held a Postdoc position at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and now work in the Brooks Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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