Rouages: "Maintaining a healthy environment for biological material".
Lauriane Bisch is a zootechnician at the Ifremer station in Palavas-les-flots. Every day, she feeds, cares for and maintains six to seven thousand zebrafish and medaka, model fish whose eggs will be used for research. A mission she details in the Rouages video series produced by the University of Montpellier. Get moving!
Since January 2024, Lauriane Bisch has swapped the lagoon of Tahiti for the lagoon of Palavas. Cozy up in the cafeteria of the Ifremer station, overlooking the Etang du Prévost swept by February winds, the animal experimentation technician tells us about her homecoming after eight years at Ifremer Pacific. " I started by doing a DUT in biological engineering in Montpellier, then a BTS in aquaculture in Brittany. I dreamed of training in pearl farming, so I went straight to Tahiti, where I was lucky enough to be recruited by Ifremer. "
"In tee-shirts all year round!"
Then it was life that prompted the young woman to move closer to her native region. " We can't complain: here too, we work in magnificent surroundings, and in the model fish room, we're in T-shirts all year round! Around 40m2, an ambient temperature of 25 or 26 degrees and everywhere shelves occupied by aquariums where thousands of small fish frolic. " On the right are the medaka, an estuary fish found in Asia. They live in softened water, which is slightly less salty than sea water, but is still salt water. On the left are zebrafish, which live in tropical environments but in freshwater.
Every morning, Lauriane Bisch cleans and checks the condition of dozens of basins using connected multi-parameter probes that give her live data on water temperature, nitrite levels, salinity, PH... "This is an instrument we use a lot, to check water quality at any given moment. It's an instrument we use a lot, to check water quality at any given moment. The aim is to keep them in a healthy environment so as to have biological material for experimentation. And the biological material in question is the eggs she collects every day from the bottom of the aquariums. This is because the fish she raises are broodstock that are not intended for animal experimentation. " It's their babies that will be used by researchers at different stages of their lives, from embryo to juvenile or even adult.
"Like a dog happy to see you"
If you look at the dates inscribed on the aquariums, you'll see that in the model fish room, the oldest individuals can be up to 5 years old. This gives them the opportunity to develop a special relationship with their caretaker, who not only keeps them in a healthy environment, but also feeds and cares for them on a daily basis. " It's important for me to work with animals. As they're fish, you'd think there'd be no interaction, but when it's time to feed or clean, they all come to the front of the aquarium. It's a bit like coming home to a dog who's happy to see you.
While she alone reigns over the medaka and zebrafish population, there are five of them working as zootechnicians at the Ifremer station in Palavas-les-flots. Alongside Lauriane Bisch's small fish, there are larger species emblematic of the Mediterranean ecosystem, such as sea bream and, above all, sea bass. At the Palavas center, over 500 live broodstock are kept and bred to produce wild and selected lines. " We zootechnicians don't do research, but thanks to the work we do every day, we also help to advance science.