Webinar

Into the Twilight Zone:

How Modern Imaging Technology is Supporting Zooplankton Research

Speaker:
Eloïse Savineau, University of Exeter

Duration: 30 minutes

Zooplankton play a vital role in oceanic food webs, acting as a link between primary producers and larger consumers such as fish, birds, and marine mammals. They are also central to oceanic carbon cycling, interacting with, transforming, and transporting carbon from surface to deep layers of the ocean. Recent years have seen a growing trend towards the digitalization of the ocean, with semiautonomous imaging technologies increasingly being used to characterize zooplankton communities, albeit with limited comparison to traditional techniques.

In this webinar, we discuss how bench-top instruments such as FlowCam Macro can be used as an effective alternative to time- and labor-intensive traditional microscopy analysis for broad-level taxonomic analysis of zooplankton samples.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Eloïse is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in marine zooplankton ecology within the OceanPlankton team at the University of Exeter. Her current research focuses on how environmental change over the past three decades has shaped zooplankton communities across the Atlantic Ocean, drawing on a long-term dataset collected during the Atlantic Meridional Transect cruises and processed with FlowCam Macro. Eloïse's expertise spans zooplankton trophic/physiological ecology, biogeochemistry, stable isotopes, lipid biomarkers, plankton imaging, an size spectrum theory, with a particular focus on the ocean's twilight zone, a critical but still poorly understood region of the ocean. She completed her PhD in zooplankton ecology and biogeochemistry at the University of Southampton in 2025. During her doctoral studies, she participated in four open-ocean research expeditions, totaling 5 months at sea, and has gained strong working knowledge of zooplankton and oceanographic sampling techniques.

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