The Derry Lab

Views and vistas from hiking our research equipment to study mountain lakes in the Canadian Rockies for Julien Beaulieu's PhD, Daphné Trépanier-Leroux's MSc, and Matthew Yates's PDF research.

Julien Beaulieu is a PhD student working on a whole lakes experiment in the Canadian Rockies in collaboration with the @The fraser lab. His project objective is to study the effect of size-selective harvesting on brook trout spatial distribution using eRNA, their diet, prey communities and ecosystems metabolism. He is currently working on a side project looking at aquatic invertebrate recovery after rotenone application.

Congratulations to PhD student Cristina Charette on being interviewed about her doctoral research for the famous Québec TV program, La Semaine Verte, last week. Her project addresses the impacts of invasive round goby fish on food web quality and contaminant transfer in the Upper St. Lawrence River. Stay tuned for a link to the program :)

This is the miniature house that we rented last summer to do our lake research in Alaska. Notice our plankton nets hanging out front! Next time we won't rent a house quite as miniature, we realized.

This is another one of our lab boats: 'The Whirligig', named after the aquatic beetle that has eyes that enable it to see both above and below the water as it skims along the surface. We keep it in Alaska for our lake research there. Shown here from last summer with myself, and MSc students Mariane and Sarah (L to R).

Mariane Daneau-Lamoureux is a MSc candidate in our lab. The objective of her research is to evaluate the functional role of divergent ecotypes of threespine stickleback as a vector for fatty acid transfer across aquatic food webs in northern lakes spread across the Cook Inlet Basin in Alaska. Even though her fieldwork was cancelled this summer due to covid-19, working from home does not prevent her from being surrounded by the mountains. You can take the biologist out of the mountains, but you can't take the mountains out of the biologist!