Publié le 4 novembre 2024
** English follows **
Le concours photos “Le monde en détails à travers l’objectif” est maintenant terminé !
Ce concours avait pour but de mettre de l’avant les projets des étudiant.e.s de la communauté d’EcotoQ sous forme d’image. Proposé par le comité étudiant, cette deuxième édition fut un succès : 6 photos reçues dans la catégorie Terrain et 8 pour la catégorie laboratoire. Merci encore à tou.te.s les participant.e.s !
Il est maintenant temps de vous dévoiler les gagnants du concours, toutes nos félicitations à eux !
Vous pouvez toujours retrouver l’ensemble des photos candidates ICI.
Nous avons hâte de vous retrouver l’année prochaine pour découvrir de nouvelles œuvres !
** English **
The “The World in Detail Through the Lens” photo competition is now finished!
The aim of this competition was to showcase the projects of students from the EcotoQ community in image. Proposed by the student committee, this second edition was a success: 6 photos were received in the Field category and 8 in the Laboratory category. Thanks again to all participants!
Now it’s time to announce the winners, congratulations to all of them!
You can still find all the candidate photos HERE.
We look forward to seeing you next year to discover new pictures!
Field Category
Photo the most surprisng, the most representative of the research project and the funniest ($300)
Justine Labelle
UdeM
The most artistic ($100)
Jonathan Sangiovanni
McGill University
Successful harvesting in a contaminated lake in Yellowknife, NWT
Back after a long, windy day of sampling zooplankton, sediments and various water parameters on one of Yellowknife’s most arsenic-contaminated lakes (Handle Lake), Northwest Territories (NWT). At the lake’s edge, team members also collected amphipods, sediments and periphyton. This sampling is part of my research project to evaluate the potential of the amphipod Hyalella azteca and zooplankton as environmental biomonitoring tools for rare earth elements (REE), uranium (U) and thorium (Th) in this mining region. 100 km to the southeast lies the Nechalacho mine, the region’s first rare earths mine, which opened in spring 2021 but is currently experiencing operating difficulties.
Back to Bergin Island
Herring gulls nest in early spring on arid Bergin Island in South Stormont, Ontario. Perched in the trees among the swarm of gulls, cormorants are competitive bedfellows on this island in search of space to lay their eggs. We’ve come here to dive into their broods. Birds are important sentinels of environmental health. Their interactions with the aquatic and terrestrial environments can help us glean information about a habitat and the state of community members. We collect unincubated eggs from these wild bird species to monitor the chemical load present in these natural microcosms. We also carry out further analyses to explore the responses of their genetic landscape following the introduction of environmentally relevant contaminants. This information helps us to predict the effects of pollutants on wildlife. This image was captured on 35mm color film (FlicFilm Elektra 100) using a Nikon FE manual single-lens reflex (SLR) camera. I developed the film with Unicolor C-41 developer. The negatives were scanned and digitized using the PlusTek 8100 scanner. Images were lightly edited using Adobe Lightroom.
Lab Category
Photo the most surprisng, the most representative of the research project and the funniest ($300)
Marie-Christine Lafrenière
UdeM
The most artistic ($100)
Laura Malbezin
INRS
The plankton of my country are winter plankton
In my free interpretation of the song Mon Pays, Gilles Vigneault pays tribute to the resilience of plankton and their ability to survive long winters.
It’s thanks to their large energy reserves of polyunsaturated fatty acids that copepods remain active in our frozen lakes. This photo shows a calanoid copepod, a selective herbivore, sampled at the Forêt d’enseignement et de recherche Simoncouche, Chicoutimi in early March 2024.
In autumn, copepods store these fatty acids in the form of lipid droplets by ingesting microalgae whose reddish-orange pigments help protect them from oxidation. At this time of year, up to 70% of their body mass is made up of these fats. These copepods can thus survive hundreds of days of starvation during the harsh Quebec winters. When you look at these copepods under the microscope, you can see the orange droplets emerging from the organism.
In ecotoxicology, lipids play an important role in the accumulation of lipophilic contaminants such as PAHs, PCBs and methyl-mercury. During periods of food scarcity, they can store and metabolize more contaminants, making them accessible to higher levels in the food chain, such as fish. Winter is therefore a very important season to consider when studying contaminant dynamics.
It’s for you, plankton, that I want to own my winters.
Water pearl on parafilm
This photo was taken in my co-director’s laboratory in France, at the end of a gray day. It had already been a few weeks since I had arrived in this laboratory, where I was to carry out experiments as part of my thesis. I was feeling a little dizzy from the amount of new information, new people, everything that had to be done in a limited time. As I finished doing my laboratory dishes, I saw these water beads on one of the plastic kerosene films (parafilm M) on the Erlenmeyer flasks. The sight of these delicate drops of water relaxed me and allowed me to sit back and contemplate the present moment, like a little intermission in this hectic period of my student life.
Féliciations ! Congratulations !
If you have any suggestions concerning this competition, please contact the student committee at ce.ecotoq@inrs.ca