María Jesús García Bianco

Research Fellow 

SFB 1372 Magnetoreception and Navigation in Vertebrates
Institute of Avian Research
An der Vogelwarte 21
26386 Wilhelmshaven
Germany

Email: maria.bianco@ifv-vogelwarte.de

During my current SFB fellowship, I am studying mercury pollution levels in the body feathers of six tern species wintering along different parts of the west-African coastline and caught in Senegal during spring migration. I am also performing stable isotope analyses of feathers from these same individual birds to infer their diet and foraging areas and explore the association with their pollution levels. 

Furthermore, I developed a PhD proposal with the aim to address important knowledge gaps regarding the pathways of plastic pollution within seabirds, its movement across generations, and its ecological implications. If the resulting grant application is successful, I will conduct this PhD project on the long-term study population of common terns at the Banter See, Wilhelmshaven.