María Jesús García Bianco

PhD student

During my SFB1372 fellowship, I studied 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 also performed 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 plastic pollution in seabirds, its transfer across generations, and its ecological implications. Now that this proposal has been funded, I am conducting this PhD project using the long-term study population of common terns at the Banter See, Wilhelmshaven.