Sharks and rays enthusiast, PhD candidate Lauren Meyer, has been awarded the Gruber Award for her presentation at an international sharks conference in June 2018, where she also launched her free tissue-sharing website for researchers.

Ms Meyer’s research focuses on how sharks and rays fit into food webs, with a focus on white sharks, and also manages an innovative tissue sharing platform she established for research scientists.

Her award-winning presentation at the Sharks International conference in Brazil focused on what fatty acids reveal about the ecology of sharks and rays. This work forms the second chapter of her PhD, which uses fatty acids to assess the effects of white shark cage-diving on the feeding ecology of target and non-target organisms.

She says at a biochemical level, a predator’s chemistry mirrors that of their prey items and so fatty acid profiling is an effective biochemical toolbox for investigating the feeding ecology of animals.

“Although fatty acid profiling has been used since the 1960s, it is only recently being applied to understand what sharks and rays are eating. We still don’t know a lot about how it can be used effectively for this group of animals, or what factors drive different profiles.” Ms Meyer says.

Her presentation detailed the findings of a global meta-analysis, where Ms Meyer collated fatty acid profiles from both available literature and her own work in a collective analysis to understand the known habitat, temperature, trophic group and phylogenetic relationships of sharks and rays. This allowed her to identify specific tracers which were previously unexplored for these chondrichthyes.

Together with supporting her PhD, Ms Meyer’s pioneering analysis is now available for use by other researchers investigating the feeding ecology of sharks and rays.

Tissue-sharing platform launched

The Sharks International conference brings together researchers of sharks and rays from around the world and was the ideal launching ground for Ms Meyer’s tissue-sharing web platform, Otlet, following last year’s trial for shark and ray scientists.

The full version of the free platform is now open for all research scientists working with any plant or animal anywhere in the world.