Valentine Meunier

• PhD in Marine Biology & Coral Physiology
• Postdoc position at Institut Français de Recherche pour l'Exploitation de la Mer

Over the past decade, coral bleaching events have continued to recur and intensify. During bleaching, corals expel millions of their symbionts, depriving the host from its main food source. One mechanism used by corals to resist bleaching consists in exploiting food sources other than autotrophy. Among the food sources available in the reefs, dinit...

The ability of corals to modulate their nutrition strategy in response to variable nutrient supply remains poorly understood, limiting our understanding of energy flow in coral reef ecosystems and thus our comprehension of their resilience to global changes. We used a naturally occurring nutrient gradient along the reef flat of two seabird-inhabite...

The ecological success of corals depends on their association with microalgae and a diverse bacterial assemblage. Ocean acidification (OA), among other stressors, threatens to impair host-microbial metabolic interactions that underlie coral holobiont functioning. Volcanic CO 2 seeps offer a unique opportunity to study the effects of OA in natural r...

Ocean acidification is posing a threat to calcifying organisms due to the increased energy requirements of calcification under high CO2 conditions. The ability of scleractinian corals to cope with future ocean conditions will thus depend on their ability to fulfil their carbon requirement. However, the primary productivity of coral holobionts is li...

Reef-building corals generally thrive in nutrient-poor tropical waters, where among other elements, nitrogen (N) availability often limits primary productivity. In addition to their close association with endosymbiotic dinoflagellates of the family Symbiodiniaceae, enabling an effective use and retention of dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN), scler...

Coral reefs are threatened by global warming, which disrupts the symbiosis between corals and their photosynthetic symbionts (Symbiodiniaceae), leading to mass coral bleaching. Planktonic diazotrophs or dinitrogen (N2)-fixing prokaryotes are abundant in coral lagoon waters and could be an alternative nutrient source for corals. Here we incubated un...

In the context of global change, symbiotic cnidarians are largely affected by seawater temperature elevation leading to symbiosis breakdown. This process, also called bleaching, is triggered by the dysfunction of the symbiont photosystems causing an oxidative stress and cell death to both symbiont and host cells. In our study, we wanted to elucidat...