Dr Katrin Ludynia

Email: ludynia [at] ftz-west [dot] uni-kiel [dot] de

I obtained my PhD in Marine Biology in 2007 at the West Coast Research and Technology Center (FTZ) at the University of Kiel, Germany. For my thesis "Identification and characterisation of foraging areas of seabirds in upwelling systems: biological and hydrographic implications for foraging at sea" (which can be downloaded here) I studied the foraging behaviour of several seabird species in the Humboldt and Benguela Currents. In Chile, studies were carried out in cooperation with Prof. Guillermo Luna Jorquera at the Universidad Católica del Norte in Coquimbo. In Namibia, I worked with Dr Jessica Kemper and Dr Jean-Paul Roux at the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources in Lüderitz.

While conducting the fieldwork for my PhD and my Diploma thesis on Kelp Gulls in Chile, I spent time on several remote islands, some of which hosted the most amazing Namibian and Chilean seabird breeding colonies. In 2004 I was also able to join an expedition to the Snares, a subantarctic island that belongs to New Zealand, where I took part in a study concerning the foraging behaviour of Snares Penguins.

So far, I have deployed a variety of data loggers on penguins, gannets and boobies, as well as cormorants, in order to find out more about their foraging and diving behaviour. Making penguins vomit is one of the methods I use for studying seabird diets, but I also crumble up cormorant faecal pellets and I am currently planning on using stable isotopes to conduct further diet analyses. The greatest outcome of all my scientific work so far has been the declaration of Namibia's first Marine Protected Area around the most important seabird breeding sites along the southern Namibian coast. This MPA has been designed based partly on my studies on the foraging areas of African Penguins and will hopefully lead to better protection of several threatened seabird species in Namibia.

I started becoming involved with the ADU during a short-term postdoctoral project in 2008, when I was able to collaborate with Prof. Les Underhill during my work on the Namibian seabirds. I am currently planning to continue the work in the Benguela System in the next few years, hopefully as a postdoctoral fellow at the ADU.

Besides my work in upwelling systems, I have been involved in the European Seabird-at-Sea Working Group, conducting surveys at sea and trying to evaluate the impact of offshore windfarms on seabirds in German waters.