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‘The unsuspected history of the oyster”: Stéphane Pouvreau guest on La Terre au carré

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Our colleague Stéphane POUVREAU was guest on ‘La Terre au Carré’, the famous radio broadcast on France Inter on 4 February, alongside Catherine Dupont (archaeomalacologist at the CNRS).

Conducted by Mathieu VIDARD, the broadcast, entitled ‘L’histoire insoupçonnée de l’huître’(The unsuspected history of the oyster), looked back at the eventful history of this shellfish that is so emblematic of gastronomy.

Present on Earth for over 150 million years, the oyster has left its mark on human history, from prehistory to the present day. Hunter-gatherers were already enjoying this mollusc 8,000 years ago. In Antiquity, it became a luxury food prized by the Romans, who innovated in oyster farming. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, oysters epitomised refinement, appreciated by monarchs such as Louis XIV and Louis XVIII. However, the oyster often came close to extinction, falling victim to over-fishing and disease. The 20th century saw the flat oyster decimated, gradually replaced by imported varieties, mainly the Japanese oyster we eat today.

Today, restoration programmes such as REHPAR, run by Stéphane, are trying to preserve this emblematic species in te bay of Brest. A handful of oyster farmers in Quiberon Bay are still producing the traditional flat oyster, the guardian of a threatened maritime heritage.

listen to the podcast on the France Inter website

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Claire Hellio, Knight of the French National Order of Merit

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Congratulations to our colleague Claire Hellio who has just been appointed “Knight of the National Order of Merit“! This national distinction has a threefold purpose: to reflect the dynamism of society, set an example, and recognize the diversity (cultural, social, and economic) of French society. Claire had already received in September 2023 the CNRS Innovation Medal.

These two distinctions reward her work in biotechnology, which aims to develop environmentally friendly solutions from marine-derived compounds for cosmetic products or antifouling, among others.

You can find the other personalities from Finistère appointed to the National Order of Merit in this article from Ouest-France.

 

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Temporal monitoring of mercury concentrations in tuna, the work of Anaïs Médieu in the press

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The work of Anaïs Medieu on the temporal monitoring of mercury concentrations in tuna has recently been the subject of numerous articles in the national and international press:

As not all of these publications are open access, here is a summary of Anaïs’s results.

The stability of mercury concentrations in tuna since 1971 reflects the inertia of the oceans and calls for massive reductions in emissions to achieve the objectives of the Minamata Convention.

Humans are exposed to toxic methylmercury mainly by consuming marine fish that bioaccumulate methylmercury in the oceans. The Minamata Convention on Mercury of the UN aims to reduce human exposure to mercury through the reduction of anthropogenic emissions. But has this reduction effort led to a reduction in methylmercury concentrations in the oceans and marine fish? An international team of researchers, coordinated by IRD, addressed this question by compiling nearly 3000 mercury measurements in tuna samples captured between 1971 and 2022 in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans.

The study reveals that mercury concentrations in tuna have remained globally stable since 1971, except in the northwest Pacific where they significantly increased at the end of the 1990s, probably in connection with the massive increase in anthropogenic emissions associated with the intensive use of fossil fuels for electricity production in Asia. Elsewhere, the stability of mercury levels in tuna does not reflect the global decrease in mercury levels in the atmosphere resulting from emission reduction policies. The researchers attribute this stability in tuna to the inertia of the oceans and the stock of mercury historically emitted that continues to feed the surface or subsurface waters where tuna live. This mercury was emitted decades, if not centuries ago, and does not yet reflect the effects of emission reductions in the atmosphere.

The researchers also simulated the impact of different emission reduction policies on mercury levels in the oceans. Even the strictest emission policy would take 10 to 25 years to initiate a decrease in mercury concentrations in the oceans. These results highlight the need for a global effort to achieve the objectives of the Minamata Convention to reduce emissions and call for continued and long-term global monitoring of mercury levels in marine life.

 

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The ocean may be storing more carbon than estimated in previous studies

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Our colleague Frédéric Le Moigne contributed to an international study on the efficiency of the oceanic carbon pump. The study, published this week in Nature magazine, reassesses the ocean’s capacity to store carbon, particularly through ‘marine snow’. The CNRS issued a press release about this publication :

The ocean’s capacity to store atmospheric carbon dioxide is almost 20% higher than the estimates presented in the latest IPCC report. These are the findings of a study published in the journal Nature on 6 December 2023 by an international team including a biologist from the CNRS. The scientists looked at the role played by plankton in the natural transport of carbon from the surface to the seabed.

Plankton is fond of this gas, which it transforms into organic tissue through photosynthesis during its development, and some of it is transformed into marine particles at the end of its life. Denser than seawater, this ‘marine snow’ sinks to the seabed, storing carbon and providing essential nutrients for many deep-sea creatures, from tiny bacteria to deep-sea fish.

Based on the study of a database collected from around the world since the 1970s using oceanographic vessels, the team of seven scientists were able to digitally map the fluxes of organic matter throughout the oceans. The resulting new estimate of storage capacity is 15 gigatonnes per year, an increase of around 20% on the previous studies (11 gigatonnes per year) reported by the IPCC in its 2021 report.

This reassessment of the seabed’s storage capacity represents a significant advance in our understanding of carbon exchanges between the atmosphere and the ocean at a global level. While the team stresses that this absorption process takes place over tens of thousands of years, and is therefore not sufficient to offset the exponential increase in CO2 emissions generated by global industrial activity since 1750, this study nevertheless reinforces the importance of the ocean ecosystem as a major player in regulating the global climate in the long term.

Global distribution of organic carbon flux from the surface layer of the open ocean.
© Wang et al., 2023, Nature.

 

Reference:

Biological carbon pump estimate based on multi-decadal hydrographic data. Wei-Lei Wang, Weiwei Fu, Frédéric A. C. Le Moigne, Robert T. Letscher, Yi Liu, Jin-Ming Tang, and François W. Primeau. Nature, le 6 décembre 2023.
DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06772-4

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Claire Hellio, awarded the CNRS Innovation Medal

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Congratulations to our colleague Claire HELLIO, who has been awarded the 2023 CNRS Innovation Medal!

Claire, a University Professor at UBO, is in charge of the BIODIMAR platform. The platform is dedicated to biotechnology research, and develops solutions for producing more environmentally-friendly products, mainly from molecules of marine origin.

Extract from the CNRS press release:

Claire Hellio, drawing inspiration from natural molecules for environmentally-friendly products

Claire Hellio develops innovative bioinspired solutions based on active molecules produced by algae and microorganisms. Conducted at the Laboratoire des sciences de l’environnement marin, this work, at the interface between chemistry, biology, biochemistry and ecology, is carried out via the Biodimar bioprospecting platform, which this professor heads up.

Her team responds to the problems and R&D needs of manufacturers, developing specific biotests and innovative biotechnological solutions based on natural substances of marine origin. Applications are mainly in the fields of cosmetics (antioxidants and preservatives) and antifouling coatings (protection of boat hulls against colonization). These solutions are made as environmentally-friendly as possible. This collaboration with companies has, for example, taken the form of a joint laboratory called BiotechALg in partnership with Green Sea, the European leader in microalgae production.

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Copyright : Laboratoire LEMAR- 2018

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