Marc Besson

Aquatic ecosystems are facing increasingly frequent and severe anthropogenic perturbations.

These stressors can be very diverse (e.g. heat waves, chemical and plastic pollution, habitat changes) and can independently and/or synergistically affect the the biology of aquatic organisms and functioning of aquatic ecosystems.

I am particularly interested in the effects of stressors on key ecological processes, e.g. predator-prey dynamics and resilience loss, and on critical life-history transitions, e.g. bottlenecks and important developmental steps such as larval recruitment and metamorphosis. I use a variety of aquatic study systems, but reef fishes are my main model organisms.

I like to use experimental and integrative approaches, from molecular biology to behavioral ecology, and automated and reproducible methods to investigate the inner biological mechanisms explaining how broader ecological processes can be affected by multiple stressors.