In the continuation of its portrait series, the RedPol team presents: Caroline Arcanjo. Like Sylvain Slaby, she is a post-doc in the UMR-I02 SEBIO laboratory at the University of Le Havre in Normandy, studying the copepod Eurytemora affinis. She is supervised by Céline Boulangé Lecomte and Joëlle Forget-Leray and assisted by Flavie Desreac who is doing her Master 2 internship.
The copepod Eurytemora affinis is a transparent zooplanktonic micro-crustacean measuring one millimetre long. It is therefore difficult to see with the naked eye. It is abundant in the waters of the Seine estuary, which makes it a good study model for the laboratory.
Caroline’s role in the RedPol project is to develop a bioassay on the swimming behaviour of copepods. This bioassay will evaluate how pollutants, chosen by the project members, will impact their swimming behaviour. To do this, they are using the DanioVison (Noldus), an exposure chamber initially used to study the swimming behaviour of fish larvae but which has been adapted for copepods. This device will make it possible to film the copepods and then send the videos to software (EthovisionXT, Noldus) for analysis. She has thus developed a protocol to measure the effects of pollutants on the swimming behaviour of copepods, in order to answer the questions of the RedPoL project.