Credits

My education in biology is diverse…I’ve had experience in many areas during my career thus far.  During my bachelors degree I took courses in several areas but I guess my specialty was in marine biology.  I spent a great deal of time at Bamfield Marine Station and my time there really shaped the researcher in me.  It definitely made me realize that I wanted to be a biologist and live and work in amazing places like that!

The research I undertook for my MSc at the University of Victoria was in the area of evolution and development.  I have always been fascinated with the process of development, the fact that we cannot think of biological processes as occurring to just one stage of life.  I worked on a few species of marine snails in a project that looked at evolutionary changes to the process of gastropod torsion.  I was really lucky to learn several high-definition morphological techniques like transmission electron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy and immunoflourescence microscopy.  There are some pretty fantastic images in my paper from this work:

For my PhD  I was interested in continuing on my quest to involve the process of development in studies of biology, but I moved to the great realm of ecology.  My work was carried out in the beautiful coastal streams of British Columbia and the North Island of New Zealand, and my focus organisms were freshwater crayfish.  I guess you could say that in addition to being an ecologist and population biologist I am somewhat of a ‘crayfish expert’!  Here are some publications that have come out of that work:

Bondar, C.A. and Richardson, J.S. (in review) Stage-specific interactions between dominant consumers within a small stream ecosystem: direct and indirect consequences.

Bondar, C.A. ‘Pacifastacus’. 2010. In ‘Biology of Freshwater Crayfishes’,  Kawai, T. editor, Hokkaido University Press, Japan.

Bondar, C.A. and Richardson, J.S. 2009. The effects of ontogenetic stage and density on the ecological role of the signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus) in a stream within its native range.  Journal of the North American Benthological Society 28(2): 294-304.PDF.

Bondar, C.A., Zeron, K., Richardson, J.S. 2006.  Risk sensitive foraging by juvenile signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus). Canadian Journal of Zoology 84: 1693-1697.PDF.

Richardson, J.S., Bilby, R.E. and Bondar, C.A. 2005. Organic matter dynamics in small streams of the Pacific Northwest.  Journal of the American Water Resources Association 41: 921-934.PDF

Bondar, C.A., Bottriell, K., Zeron, K. and Richardson, J.S. 2005. Does trophic position of hte omnivorous signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus) in a stream food web vary with life history stage or density?  Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 62: 2632-2639. PDF

Bondar, C.A., Zhang, Y. and Richardson, J.S. 2003. The conservation status of the freshwater crayfish, Pacifastacus leniusculus, in British Columbia, Canada.  Ministry of Land, Water and Air Protection Management Report 117. PDF