Khuong Dinh

Thanks Daniel! I was a cold, dark, but great experience :)

Grateful to the amazing crew and scientists who made this polar night adventure possible. The Arctic never ceases to amaze, especially when I know more about how busy it is below the silent ice.

From 2000–4000 m, we collected fascinating amphipods, decapods and jellyfish. These deep-sea animals are fascinating to study how energy, resources, and persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are transported to the Arctic abyss via the biological pump

It was an epic expedition to the dark and frozen Nansen Basin. Working in air temperatures below -20 °C with biting wind, we deployed Mammoth and MIK nets to 4000 m depth in the Arctic Ocean. Sampling during this special time of year taught me far more about zooplankton communities than I expected.

When the ocean breathes in the cold 🥶 (-20 °C), snow dances across the deck, the moon lights our way, and we sample zooplankton in the heart of the Arctic polar night.

A mammoth net hauls zooplankton from 4000 m depths in the Nansen Basin—under -20 °C air and howling winds.

Heading North for the overwintering organisms in the dark of the Arctic (polar) nights!

Huge thanks to master's student Andrea for conducting the experiments, postdoc Mathieu for leading the writing, and all collaborators for making this possible!

We provide the first statistical determination of heat accumulation tipping points. We also demonstrate that exposure to a secondary stressor can suppress tipping points to a primary stressor, thereby removing the ability of phenotypic plasticity to buffer negative impacts on fitness.

2) At 29 PSU, this corresponded to a tipping point of heat accumulation of 28 °C.d above which survival decreased.

3) Reduced salinity below 29 PSU, prevalent year-round in surface waters, suppressed this tipping point, inducing linear decreases in survival when temperature rises above 8 °C.

Sea surface freshening can suppress the thermal tipping point of marine copepods Tipping points govern species distributions, which could be impacted by ocean warming (OW) and sea surface freshening (SSF). Interactions between thes…

Happy to share our latest paper: "Sea surface freshening can suppress the thermal tipping point of marine copepods" in Science of the Total Environment! 🌊❄️
We found that:
1) Survival of Calanus copepods tipped and decreased above temperatures of 14–18 °C.
#ClimateChange #MarineEcology #OceanWarming

Calanus hyperboreus, the largest Calanus copepod in the world. The huge lipid sac inside the body is a key energy source that fuels the lipid-rich Arctic marine food web.
This is a C. hyperboreus female from the Nansen Basin. Photo @Khuong Dinh

Longyearbyen

Maybe the same isopod genus parasitising in Calanus hyperboreus. This is a photo I took a few years ago in the central Arctic Ocean.

A must-read paper

A predictive timeline of wildlife population collapse Nature Ecology & Evolution - The authors outline a framework for predicting animal population collapse under external stressors, based on a predictable sequence of observable changes through time.

Old but gold: How including data on behaviour, morphology and life-history can improve our ability to predict population collapse?🕐🐳🦭🐀🦤📉

Find out at @natecoevo.nature.com here: rdcu.be/c4dXqVery, with @expecocons.bsky.social @dzchilds.bsky.social

Great to have this finally out! A whole summer of experiments at @bristolbiosci.bsky.social to look for behavioural and morphological signals of collapse in protists population🔬 Thanks to @duncanobrien.bsky.social @expecocons.bsky.social @dzchilds.bsky.social and John Jackson for the great team work

very interesting and very inspiring study! Congratulation!!

Exploring marine biodiversity: A memorable field cruise with bachelor and master students for the course Marine Biology

Ecological and evolutionary consequences of changing seasonality Climate change and other anthropogenic drivers alter seasonal regimes across freshwater, terrestrial, and marine biomes. Seasonal patterns affect ecological and evolutionary processes at different eco...

Ecological and evolutionary consequences of changing seasonality | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Multiple Early Career Faculty Positions in Ecology The Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame invites applications for multiple, tenure-track assistant professor positions that will enhance existing institutional excellence in ecology. We are searching broadly for creative and collaborative individuals (1) working at any spatial scale, from local to global, in any system, (2) studying any level of biological organization, from genes to ecosystems, and (3) using any mode of inference, from empirical to theoretical. Applicants should demonstrate research excellence that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries; ongoing growth in the department will emphasize new hires that use quantitative and/or integrative approaches to study ecological processes. Postdoctoral experience is desirable in applicants. Successful candidates will engage with and benefit from UNDERC, Notre Dame’s 8000-acre environmental field station and home to NEON’s Great Lakes domain, superb on-campus chemical and genomic analytical facilities, an experimental research facility located close to campus, cross-disciplinary interactions through multiple centers and institutes including the Environmental Change Initiative, and a unique Interdisciplinary Graduate Training Program in Environment and Society. New faculty will benefit from Notre Dame’s recent campus-wide Strategic Framework that included the Just Transformations to Sustainability Initiative. Modern research facilities exist in a new environmental research building, which opened in 2025.

Multiple ecology faculty positions at @notredame.bsky.social. Apply at apply.interfolio.com/171650. (1/2). 🌎🌐🧪

Collecting Tigriopus brevicornis from a splash pool for the experiment. These tiny crustaceans are remarkable for thriving in such dynamic and fluctuating habitats.

" While the legal scholars pulled up the definition of biodiversity in international legal conventions, the anthropologists and historians started talking about how biodiversity is vernacularly understood and how the term itself is linked to some historical relation of power and domination."

BLOG | Comparative Ecologies of Conflict From 2 to 6 June, 2025, NIOD researchers, Dat Nguyen, Annika Schmeding, and Lema Salah, in collaboration with Omar Dewachi (Rutgers University) and Duong Vu (Westerdijk Institute), organised a worksho...

"During the workshop, Khuong Dinh (University of Oslo), an ecotoxicologist, raised a simple question to everyone, ‘How do you define biodiversity?’ As it turned out, everyone had a slightly different answer."

Reconsidering space-for-time substitution in climate change ecology - Nature Climate Change Ecologists often leverage patterns observed across spatial climate gradients to predict the impacts of climate change (space-for-time substitution). We highlight evidence that this can be misleading n...

Reconsidering space-for-time substitution in climate change ecology:
This can be misleading, not just in the magnitude but in the direction of effects
?

Southeast Asia's biodiversity crisis.

Thanks for sharing this!

A new giant species of Acrophylla Gray, 1835 (Phasmida: Phasmatidae: Phasmatini) from the highlands of the Wet Tropics, Queensland, Australia. | Zootaxa

Wow, a new giant stick insect species, 40 cm long discovered in Queensland, Australia.

mapress.com/zt/article/v...