Seabirds Under Pressure: Revealing the Effects of Mercury Exposure

ended

Mercury emission into the environment is a globally relevant issue because exposure to mercury represents a significant threat to humans and biodiversity worldwide. Now more than ever, we need to understand how will exposure to mercury contamination affect life history traits of wildlife. SUPREME aims to investigate for the first time the consequences of mercury exposure in seabirds with a particular focus on physiological traits and susceptibility to viral diseases, a topic that clearly deserve further investigations given the dramatic rise in mercury contamination and the likely increase of infectious diseases occurrence in the years to come. The project aims to address two main objectives: i) assess to which extent mercury exposure causes physiological dysfunction and facilitates the manifestation of the disease and ii) determine whether mercury accumulation and viral disease accelerate telomere shortening. The existing high levels of mercury and the annual viral outbreaks that cause the mortality of almost all seabird chicks in the study site (a small island in French Guiana, South America) exploit an unprecedented opportunity to investigate a topic that remains largely unexplored. Not only SUPREME will combine the collection of longitudinal (within-individual variation over time) with experimental data, but will benefit from hundreds of blood samples (i.e. 413) collected by myself from 2015 to 2017. SUPREME has an extra value in terms of conservation because it will be carried out on a colony of Magnificent frigatebirds that is considered one of the most important of South America, acting as a genetic bridge among Brazilian and Caribbean colonies. Never has it been more crucial to liase with competent authorities to implement regulatory measures to limit mercury emission into the environment. SUPREME aims to also reach this objective by demonstrating the impact of environmental contaminants on wildlife health and by transferring the results to local authorities