Alumni, PhD

Loïc Baulier

Loïc Baulier is now doing a postdoctorate at the Laboratory of Fisheries Biology Department of Fisheries Sciences and Technologies, Research Station in Lorient, France.

Research interests

Deep sea fisheries in the eastern Atlantic started developing in the late 1960s, driven by trawlers from the former USSR. French deep sea fisheries took of around the end of the 1980s on the West side of the British Isles, with trawlers getting progressively more specialised to target deep sea species. Among the first landed fishes were orange roughy (Hoplostethus atlanticus), roundnose grenadier (Coryphaenoides rupestris), black scabbard fish (Aphanopus carbo) as well as the somehow shallower blue ling (Molva dipterygia).
Due to their particular biology, especially regarding their low production rate, deep sea fishes are often considered to be likely to be very vulnerable to exploitation. However, owing to the recent history of the fishery, the onset of scientific monitoring is only recent ("data poor" stocks) and diagnostics about the impact the reaction of the exploited populations to harvesting are very hard to provide ("one-way trips" in stock size). The data available to the ICES come from logbooks filled by fishers and have hence a low spatial resolution (statistical rectangle) and the fishing effort is often hard to quantify as only the daily catch (after discard) is reported.
The French fleets based in Lorient, Concarneau and Boulogne realise most of the catches in these areas nowadays. As part of a collaboration with Ifremer and in order to improve the quality of stock assessments, fishermen organisations have recently begun providing hitherto confidential data about individual trawl hauls on a voluntary basis. The city council Cap l'Orient and Ifremer have decided founding a research project to exploit this valuable information and improve the knowledge of the response of deep sea fishes to exploitation.
This post-doctorate project is due to last one year, starting in March 2010.
 

My new coordinates are:
Loïc BAULIER
IFREMER, Research Station in Lorient
Fisheries Biology Lab.
Fisheries Sciences and Technologies Department
8, rue François Toullec
56100 Lorient, France
Tel.: +33 2 97 87 38 67
Fax: +33 2 97 87 38 36
Email: Loic.Baulier[at]ifremer.fr