E. Feunteun

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Verified

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• PhD in Marine Ecology and biology
• Professor (Full) at Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle

River infrastructures such as weirs, hydropower stations or water reservoirs represent obstructions to migration for diadromous fish. Knowledge of accurate behaviour of fish in front of such structures is required to protect migrants from hazardous areas, guide them towards safe passage or adapt structure to improve the escapement. We developed and...

1. The drastic decline in European eel Anguilla anguilla stock is now widely recognized. However, while various causes for this decline have been identified, the relative importance of each cause remains unclear. 2. During the catadromous migration of silver eels, the negative impact of dams is frequently highlighted, but mainly for powered dams (w...

Global declines in elasmobranchs have been observed. Conservation measures such as area closures and fisheries prohibitions have been put in place to support the recovery of vulnerable species. However, the effectiveness of such measures is rarely evaluated in the context of other factors that may affect population abundance. This study investigate...

The European eel is critically endangered. Although the quality of silver eels is essential for their reproduction, little is known about the effects of multiple contaminants on the spawning migration and the European eel management plan does not take this into account. To address this knowledge gap, we sampled 482 silver eels from 12 catchments ac...

The mysterious food source of anguilliform leptocephali has been difficult to understand, so this review evaluates potential interrelationships among recent discoveries on this subject. There are typically few identifiable gut-content objects in leptocephalus intestines, which usually contain amorphous materials. Gut content observation studies and...

Ectotherms are especially vulnerable to global warming due to their temperature-sensitive metabolic processes, impacting survival and reproductive success. Elasmobranchs, with slow life histories and low reproductive rates, may face amplified risks. In this study, we investigated two catshark species with distinct life traits and distributions: the...

Many organisms inhabiting the interface between land and sea have evolved biological clocks corresponding to the period of the semilunar (14.77 days) or the lunar (29.53 days) cycle. Since tidal amplitude is modulated across the lunar cycle, these circasemilunar or circalunar clocks not only allow organisms to adapt to the lunar cycle, but also to...

Estuaries are complex ecotones including multiple lateral habitats that play essential functions for fish assemblages. However, the distribution of fish diversity and community assembly processes remain poorly documented in these habitats. This paper investigated the taxonomic and functional diversities of fish assemblages along lateral continuums...

La gestion hydraulique du lac de Grand-Lieu est défavorable au retour des anguilles vers la mer, où elles se reproduisent. Une étude utilisant la télémétrie acoustique a permis de comprendre ce dysfonctionnement, ouvrant la voie à une meilleure gestion de ce site prestigieux.

Les estuaires sont des écosystèmes complexes à l’interface entre le milieu marin et l’eau douce, associés à de nombreuses fonctions écologiques et services écosystémiques. Malgré l’importance de ces habitats de nourricerie dans la régulation de nombreux stocks de poissons présentant des enjeux écologiques et commerciaux, les estuaires sont globalem...

Malgré l’intérêt croissant pour la cartographie des fonds marins, seul un quart d’entre eux a pu être levé fidèlement à une résolution de l’ordre du km (30 arc-secondes). Ceci s’explique par les lourds coûts engendrés par les campagnes par bateau (sonar) et/ou par avion (lidar). Ainsi, la bathymétrie dérivée de satellite connaît un essor considérab...

Many organisms inhabiting the interface between land and sea have evolved biological clocks corresponding to the period of the semilunar (14.77d) or the lunar (29.53d) cycle. Since tidal amplitude is modulated across the lunar cycle, these circasemilunar or circalunar clocks allow organisms to adapt to the tides. Biological clocks are synchronized...

In a 10-month experimental study, we assessed the combined impact of warming and acidification on critical life stages of small-spotted catshark (Scyliorhinus canicula). Using recently developed frameworks, we disentangled individual and group responses to two climate scenarios projected for 2100 (SSP2-4.5: Middle of the road and SSP5-8.5: Fossil-f...

Despite the popularity of stable isotope analysis (Carbon and Nitrogen), the drivers of species isotopic niches and their consequences on food web functioning remained poorly described, especially in estuaries. Here, we hypothesised that species niche characteristics are influenced by ecosystem hydro-morphological features and the functional struct...

The temporal asynchronies in larvae production from different spawning areas are fundamental components for ensuring stability and resilience of marine metapopulations. Such a concept, named portfolio effect, supposes that diversifying larval dispersal histories should minimize the risk of recruitment failure by increasing the probability that at l...

While spatial distribution shifts have been documented in many marine fishes under global change, the responses of elasmobranchs have rarely been studied, which may have led to an underestimation of their potential additional threats. Given their irreplaceable role in ecosystems and their high extinction risk, we used a 24-­year time series (1997–2...

Despite the increasing interest in the bathymetry mapping in the context of the sea level rise and storm intensification, only 10% of the worldwide bathymetry has been mapped with reliable sonar and lidar, due to their high cost. The satellite-derived bathymetry (SDB) has therefore grown for the last decades, due to its affordability, but also to i...

L’impact des barrages sur la continuité écologique est connu et largement documenté. Chez les espèces catadromes, en empêchant l’accès à l’amont, les obstacles créent des surdensités en aval induisant une forte compétition intraspécifique, ce qui peut donner lieu à une réduction de la croissance, une dégradation des conditions sanitaires et, in fin...

Competition arises when species share a limited resource, but this can be avoided through niche partitioning. Despite the large body of literature on diadromous fishes, very few studies have focused on niche partitioning when competing for resources. Diadromous fishes are suffering a global decline throughout their range in part due to their peculi...

The American eel (Anguilla rostrata) has long been regarded as a panmictic fish and has been confirmed as such in the northern part of its range. In this paper, we tested for the first time whether panmixia extends to the tropical range of the species. To do so, we first assembled a reference genome (975 Mbp, 19 chromosomes) combining long (PacBio...

L’anguille est une espèce emblématique, classée en danger critique d’extinction par l’UICN. Elle est caractérisée par un cycle biologique complexe, partagé entre le milieu marin, où se déroulent la reproduction et la phase larvaire, et les milieux aquatiques continentaux, où se déroulent la croissance et la maturation sexuelle. Les vallées estuarie...

The French National Committee for Scientific Diving (CNPS) takes on different tasks including acting as an observatory of occupational scientific diving practices and innovations (Thouzeau et al., 2019). Since 1991 in France, scientific diving has been recognized by law as an occupational sector and is therefore regulated with the aim to reduce the...

Species identification remains crucial for interpreting acoustic backscatter delivered by active acoustic methodologies. The study took place in a Marine Protected Area where highly restricted areas were present such as no take zones. We used an innovative methodology coupling split-beam and multibeam echosounders to detect and classify monospecifi...

Introduction While crucial to ensuring the production of accurate and high-quality data—and to avoid erroneous conclusions—data quality control (QC) in environmental monitoring datasets is still poorly documented. Methods With a focus on annual inter-laboratory comparison (ILC) exercises performed in the context of the French coastal monitoring SO...

Life-history traits of eels display a high level of phenotypic plasticity in response to large-scale biogeographical drivers, as well as local conditions encountered during the continental phase. Here, we provided a biogeographical snapshot of the variability of life-history traits of eels (Anguilla anguilla), across a large proportion of their nat...

Despite the importance of estuarine nurseries in the regulation of many fish stocks, temporal and spatial movements and habitat use patterns of juvenile fish remain poorly understood. Overall, combining several movement metrics allowed us to characterize dispersal patterns of juvenile flounder, Platichthys flesus, along an estuarine seascape. Speci...

The coastal areas are the theatre of increasing erosion and submersion risks by gathering growing hazards and exposures. Nature-based resilience is here mapped at 2 m spatial resolution using a novel fusion of morpho-bathymetry classification, derived from airborne bathymetric LiDAR, and graph-based network modelling. Connectivity results were disc...

A detailed morpho-sedimentological map of this bay, derived from the calibrated lidar rasterization with field data, provides new insights into the relationships between the nature and morphology of the sediment bodies and their overall distribution within this megatidal bay protected by numerous islands and rocky shoals.

Salt marshes offer a plethora of ecosystem services such as biodiversity support, ocean–climate change regulation, ornithology recreo tourism or plant gathering by hand. They undergo significant worldwide losses due to their conversion into crop fields and to their spatial compression between rising sea levels and armored shorelines. Their manageme...

The rich biodiversity of bays and estuary areas provides numerous services to human populations including food support, agricultural amendments [3], and tourism. These ecosystems are also the first players in coastal protection and erosion control [1]. In a global climate change context, the loss of biodiversity is critically depleting these ecosys...

Fish face multiple environmental pressures acting as multiscale filters structuring the community [6]. Study of the effect of local (~100 m2) habitat components such as habitat architecture, substrate composition, and benthic community on fish community is still limited because of the technical difficulties to sample reliable descriptors of all the...

European eel is thought to be a symbol of the effects of global change on aquatic biodiversity. The species has persisted for millions of years and faced drastic environmental fluctuations thanks to its phenotypic plasticity. However, the species has recently declined to historically low levels under synergistic human pressures. Sublethal chemical...

Life-history trait expression not only depends on the current environmental constraints, but also on the past ones that shaped traits expressed earlier in life. Such an effect, named carry-over, can occur in fish nursery grounds when juvenile performances after settlement are influenced by their larval traits in combination with conditions experien...

Very few tidal power plants exist in the world. The first one was built in the Rance estuary (Brittany, France) in 1966 and the second one in South Korea. However, with the increasing demand in renewable energy, other tidal power plant projects are being studied. These power plants are larger than unidirectional fluvial hydropower plants and strong...

Although juvenile anguillid eels live in freshwater/estuarine habitats, and marine eels live in diverse ocean environments ranging from shallow-to-deep continental shelf areas and around islands to deep-benthic habitats and deeper meso- and bathy- pelagic zones, the larvae (leptocephali) of all species mix together in the ocean surface layer. All t...

Deciphering the effects of historical and recent demographic processes responsible for the spatial patterns of genetic diversity and structure is a key objective in evolutionary and conservation biology. Using population genetic analyses, we investigated the demographic history, the contemporary genetic diversity and structure, and the occurrence o...

In recent decades, gobies have dispersed or introduced from the Ponto-Caspian region of eastern Europe in a westerly direction to North American and western European waters. By contrast, the naked goby, Gobiosoma bosc, is the only known gobiid species to have been introduced in an easterly direction from North American to western Europe. The potent...

Coastal interfaces are subject to an unprecedented rate of risks, gathering waves and rainfalls’ hazards, human assets’ densification, sea-level rise and precipitation intensification. Their sound management requires iterative observation at the highest possible spatial resolution. Sentinel-2 (S-2), provided with 13 spectral bands, datasets leverag...

River fragmentation is expected to impact not only movement patterns and distribution of eels within catchment, but also their life-history traits. Here, we used otolith multi-elemental signatures to reconstruct life sequences of European silver eels within an obstructed catchment, just before the removal of hydropower dams. Beyond providing an ini...

As human activities caused a dramatic decline of European eel population since the 1970s, the European Union has set targets to ensure a 40 % escapement to the sea of the silver eel biomass by considerably reducing anthropogenic impact. Thus, human obstacles to fish migration like dams and hydropower plants should enable efficient management measur...

Marine communities are strongly structured by bathymetry and distance from the coast. Shallow coastal areas host diverse and abundant fish communities and are subjected to strong anthropo-genic pressures. However, assessments of good ecological status of pelagic fish populations do not generally take into account the ultra-coastal fringe of the coa...

To identify key nonspecific organisational characteristics of the mid-trophic pelagic communities, which remain a challenge, we work with sound scattering layers (SSLs). Application was tested in the three African Atlantic Large Marine Ecosystems (AALMEs) to assess the utility of adapting and developing new acoustic variables. Our methodology allow...

The fine characterization of the substrate is a baseline to thoroughly investigate the relations between organisms and their biotopes. Cutting edge spatial technologies now provide access to accurate information on biotopes and biocenoses both in terrestrial and in marine environments. Photogrammetry is one of them and has recently been applied in...

The European Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) requires the achievement of good ecological status of the marine environment (Ministère de l’Écologie, du Développement durable et de l’Énergie, 2013) for all members of European Union. This directive concerns all the component of the marine environment, including fish. Up to now, fish are are...

This chapter assesses the feasibility of using natural history collections to trace temporal changes in species distribution and community composition using the example of macroalgae that are preserved as herbaria. The preservation of plants in herbaria began during the Renaissance. This technique required paper and became widespread in the 18th ce...

Deciphering the effects of historical and recent demographic processes responsible for the spatial patterns of genetic diversity and structure is a key objective in evolutionary and conservation biology. Using genetic analyses, we investigated the demographic history, the contemporary genetic diversity and structure, and the occurrence of hybridiza...

Surveying pelagic fish population dynamics in ultra-shallow waters (<20m) is often limited by research vessel size, which not usually navigate in shallow waters. Here, we use a multibeam echosounder to detect fish shoals and assess their characteristics (acoustic density and 3-D morphology) in ultra-shallow waters to follow European Marine Strategy...

The salt marshes, lying at the land-sea temperate interface, furnish a plethora of ecosystems services such as biodiversity niche support, ocean-climate change regulation, ornithology recreo-tourism or plant gathering by hand. They undergo significant worldwide losses due to their conversion into crop fields and to their spatial compression between...

Rocky-shores are among the most threatened coastal habitats, particularly under human pressures. While rocky-shore communities have been increasingly used to evaluate local anthropogenic perturbations such as water eutrophication for instance, large-scale variability in relation to both natural and anthropogenic pressures is still overlooked. Here,...

Aim The influence of niche and neutral mechanisms on the assembly of ecological communities have long been debated. However, we still have a limited knowledge on their relative importance to explain patterns of diversity across latitudinal gradients (LDG). Here, we investigate the extent to which these ecological mechanisms contribute to the LDG of...

Les collections naturalistes ont désormais acquis une place inédite dans la recherche scientifique. Constituées à l’origine par la systématique et la taxonomie, elles se révèlent aujourd’hui fondamentales pour répondre à diverses questions scientifiques et sociétales, aussi importantes qu’actuelles.Les collections naturalistes dans la science du XX...

The threat posed by invasive non-native species worldwide requires a global approach to identify which introduced species are likely to pose an elevated risk of impact to native species and ecosystems. To inform policy, stakeholders and management decisions on global threats to aquatic ecosystems, 195 assessors representing 120 risk assessment area...

Salt marshes are under increasing anthropogenic pressures that have been reported to affect the diet of fish (e.g., change in prey composition and availability), eventually resulting in alterations in their nursery function. Most studies in Europe are based on fish gut content analysis, which only reflect a small proportion of pressures to salt mar...

Anguillid eels are found globally in fresh, transitional and saline waters and have played an important role in human life for centuries. The population status of several species is now of significant concern. The threats to populations include direct exploitation at different life stages, blockages to migratory routes by dams and other structures,...

The European eel Anguilla anguilla is listed as critically endangered by the IUCN. Among many threats, the introduced parasitic nematode Anguillicola crassus is suspected to alter the eels' swim bladder and jeopardize their reproductive oceanic migration. To date, gaining knowledge about the distribution and prevalence of A. crassus requires indivi...

L’objectif de ce travail et de la convention de recherche élaborée entre le Ministère de l’Énergie, de l’Environnement et de la Mer et le Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle est d’apporter des connaissances nouvelles sur la biologie et l’écologie de l’espèce Raja undulata. Les apports pourront servir de base à la gestion et à la conservation de ce...

Abstract The Sargasso Sea has long been considered as the only spawning area for Atlantic eels, despite the absence of direct observations. The present study raises a novel scenario, deviating from Schmidt’s dogma, begins with a review of historical and recent observations that were combined to build up a global theory on spawning ecology and migra...

Salt marshes are under high, and increasing, anthropogenic pressures that have notably been reported to affect the diet of several fish species, probably resulting in nursery function alterations. Most of the previous studies in Europe were yet based on gut content analysis of fish, which can be considered a snapshot of immediate impacts of salt-ma...

• Changes in migration timing, resulting from the alteration in river continuity or the effect of climate change, can have major consequences on the population dynamics of diadromous fish. Forecasting the phenology of fish migration is thus critically important to implement management actions aimed at protecting fish during their migration. • In th...

In marine ecology, spatial and temporal fish community structure is important to understand ecosystem’s responses to anthropogenic and environmental factors. Although spatial distribution patterns and fish time series of abundance have been studied in the past, little research has addressed the impact of spatial scale on mapping spatiotemporal patt...

In the global context of river fragmentation, predicting fish migration is urgent to implement management actions aimed at protecting and promoting the free movement of diadromous fish. However, large-scale applicability of conservation measures requires transferable models that enable prediction of migration even in data-poor regions. Here, we sur...

The genus Anguilla is worldwide distributed. Part of humanity’s heritage, it represents a resource of proteins for many people. Most stages of the species within the genus Anguilla have experienced a drastic decrease of their abundance since at least the middle of the twentieth century. It is the case for European eel (Anguilla Anguilla) largely im...

Hydropower plants are commonly reported as a major cause of the worldwide decline of freshwater eels (Anguillidae), so that management solutions are urgently needed to mitigate their impacts. Where downstream passage solutions are complex to develop, turbine shutdown appears as an effective management solution to protect silver eels during their ri...

Seagrass meadows are currently known to be subjected to huge physical disturbances including boat moorings in shallow bays. We aimed to identify the impact of permanent swing mooring on the fast-growing seagrass Zostera marina in a mega-tidal area. Coupling the hydrodynamic MARS3D model to simulate mooring chain movements and in situ measurements o...

Genomic evidence is increasingly underpinning that hybridization between taxa is commonplace, challenging our views on the mechanisms that maintain their boundaries. Here, we focus on seven catadromous eel species (genus Anguilla) and use genome-wide sequence data from more than 450 individuals sampled across the tropical Indo-Pacific, morphologica...

The ecology of leptocephali remains poorly known but they appear to feed on marine snow that can vary spatially and temporally according to the food web dynamics. This study provided new information about the position of leptocephali within the functional structure of microbial plankton and other food web components of the western South Pacific (WS...

Seven South Pacific anguillid eel species live from New Guinea to French Polynesia, but their spawning areas and life histories are mostly unknown despite previous sampling surveys. A July–October 2016 research cruise was conducted to study the spawning areas and times, and larval distributions of South Pacific anguillid eels, which included a shor...

Genomic evidence is increasingly underpinning that hybridization between taxa is commonplace, challenging our views on the mechanisms that maintain their boundaries. Here, we focus on seven catadromous eel species (genus Anguilla), and use genome-wide sequence data from more than 450 individuals sampled across the tropical Indo-Pacific, morphologic...

This report reviews the citizen science programmes that produce information on fish and cephalopods of French metropolitan coasts. It shows that they provide reliable information and metrics, useful to estimate the environmental status of marine ecosystems, hence representing robust monitoring programmes for the Marine Strategy Framework Directive.

The Marine Strategy Framework Directive requires EU Member States to assess the Good Environmental Status (GES) of their marine waters in a coherent and strategic manner. For the regional assessment of biodiversity, the OSPAR Intersessional Coordination Group of Biodiversity Assessment and Monitoring (ICG-COBAM) provides substantial advice. Through...

Indo-Pacific insular freshwater systems are mainly dominated by amphidromous species. Eleotris fusca is a widespread one, its life cycle is characterised by a marine pelagic larval phase allowing the species to disperse in the ocean and then to recruit to remote island rivers. In the present study, the population structure of E. fusca over its Indo...