Aaron Comeault, Honors Student

I am currently completing the fourth year of my BSc. (honours) majoring in Biology.  While all aspects of ecological research are of interest to me, there are two primary focuses that I find especially attractive.  The first of these is research that aims to describe how organisms go about etching out an existence on our planet such as how they obtain nutrients, how they disperse, and how and why both inter- and intraspecific interactions occur.  The second type of research I am interested in is describing the impacts that human activity has on how organisms conduct their daily business.

For my honours project we are looking at the hydrothermal community structure of the island arc volcano, “Volcano 1”, which is found on the South Tonga Arc, southwest Pacific.  We are looking to describe the hydrothermal food web found at three different sites on Volcano 1, two of which are found in the photic zone. We are interested in seeing if there is a difference in the food web structure of the photic vs. the aphotic hydrothermal communities. For example, are species endemic to hydrothermal systems capable of utilizing photosynthetic carbon sources as well as chemosythetic carbon sources when they are present in the photic zone?  To do this we will be looking at the ¹³C and ¹⁴N isotopic signatures from a number of species collected from three sites on Volcano 1 during the 2007 German-Canadian collaborated “Mango” cruise.   Check out some of my preliminary findings at the Juniper lab's Discovery of the Month page.

Contact me at aaronc@uvic.ca

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