Laura-Li Jeannot

Lancaster University

Email: l.jeannot@lancaster.ac.uk

Laura-Li is an ENVISION DTP NERC funded PhD student at Lancaster Environment Centre, supervised by Prof Nick Graham, Dr Casey Benkwitt, Dr Gareth Williams (Bangor University), and Dr Simon Brandl (University of Texas). After her engineering degree in life sciences (AgroParisTech), Laura-Li went on to complete an MSc in Ecology and Evolution at the Ecole Normale Supérieure d’Ulm, France. During her studies, Laura-Li had the opportunity to work for the National Park of American Samoa, which sparked her interest for the complexity of coral reef ecosystems. She later went on to focus on fish genetics and ecology at the CRIOBE lab in Perpignan, France, where she investigated connectivity patterns in the shanny Lipophrys pholis, and the effect of anemone species on recruitment dynamics in the clownfish Amphiprion percula. Laura-Li’s current research focuses on understanding how fish communities differ across changing environmental conditions. In particular, she looks at how cryptobenthic fishes’ abundance, diversity, trophic role and recruitment dynamics vary according to nutrient input, drawing on both community ecology and population genetics.

Research Interests

Laura-Li’s broad interests lie in understanding how fish dynamics are impacted by environmental variables in the face of climate change and anthropogenic pressure. Her PhD project focuses on how fish communities reflect rat invasion and its consequences on ecosystem functioning (i.e. depletion of seabird colonies which affects nutrient cycling). Specifically, she studies small, bottom-dwelling (cryptobenthic) reef fishes to gauge how communities on nutrient-rich reefs compare to reefs next to rat-infested islands and how reef productivity may be impacted.

Through a combination of fieldwork, modelling, and population genetics, she seeks to answer four questions, 1. Do cryptobenthic communities differ between rat-infested and rat-free islands? 2. Does the role of cryptobenthic fishes differ between rat-infested and rat-free islands? 3.Do cryptobenthic communities on nutrient-rich reefs self-recruit? 4. How does this affect reef-scale ecosystem functioning?

Selected Publications

  • Jeannot LL, Mouronvalle C, Peyran C, Blanco A, Planes S. (2022) Development of 27 new microsatellites for the shanny Lipophrys pholis. Molecular Biology Reports 49: 9051-9057.