*During a 2018 expedition along the Antarctic Peninsula, Research Manager Michaël Beaulieu recorded the vocalizations of Gentoo penguins to examine how they varied depending on colony composition.*

June 11, 2025

Fresh out of vet school with his new DVM degree, in 2004 Michaël Beaulieu found himself seasick on a rickety boat bound for Terre Adélie, the narrow slice of Antarctica claimed by France.

“I stayed in my bed without eating most of the time,” says Michaël, now Research Manager at Wild Animal Initiative. “I remember thinking: I hope it’s worth it, because I’m suffering on this boat.” But after 10 days at sea, the boat reached its destination and was lodged into the ice. Finally, stillness replaced sickness.

Michaël took in the atmosphere of a place unlike any he had experienced before: the freezing, dry air on his face, and the bright sunlight shimmering on pure white ice, with a backdrop of the steel blue sea.

“From the very first second on the ice, I knew it was worth it.”

From that strange polar landscape, to subalpine mountains of the western United States, to laboratories and museums in Germany, Michaël’s career has been an expedition around the world in the pursuit of knowledge about animals. These days, most of his work is done from his desk at home, but he doesn’t think that makes it any less interesting.

“I prefer having adventures in my head now, rather than physically,” he says.

This ‘adventure in his head’ means Michaël gets to explore the questions that intrigue him most in wild animal welfare science. With his background in veterinary medicine, animal physiology, and behavioral ecology, he has thought about wild animal welfare for many years. All of those experiences have prepared him to work on it directly now with WAI.

Following a dream

As Michaël was growing up near the seaside in Normandy, France, his family’s house was home to cats, dogs, ducks, geese, and chickens. As he cared for these domestic animals, he also became captivated by magazines, books, and documentary films about wild animals. He made up his mind as a child that he wanted to become a veterinarian.

“Parents: Don’t underestimate the influence of the animals you have at home, because they can really affect your children’s future choices,” he says. “I’m sure this environment really influenced what I wanted to do with my life.”

Michaël studied biology for three years as an undergrad. The program’s final year was focused on wild animals, and he became deeply interested in them — but by that time he was already studying to take veterinary school entrance exams. When he was accepted to the National Veterinary School of Nantes, he decided to enter the program, even though it might have reduced his chances to work directly with wild animals afterward — or so he thought.

After earning his veterinary degree, Michaël hoped to enter a master’s program in wildlife sciences. But because of his veterinary background, he was not comparable to other applicants and was not accepted. Instead, he went for a master’s degree in biomedical research with, perhaps, safer career prospects.

Life on the ice

While he was finishing up his master’s, Michaël was browsing job openings for veterinarians when something about a job working with penguins in Antarctica caught his eye. He opened it out of curiosity and decided to apply. It was a longshot: He had no particular knowledge of polar regions, hardly any hands-on experience with wild animals, and he didn’t even know how to tell the difference between one penguin species and another. But he sent in his application anyway.

“For me it was like sending an application to go to the moon: As if it would work.”

But he was selected.

“I couldn’t believe it until I was on the plane,” he says — the first leg of the journey to Antarctica and his first ever flight, from Paris to Hong Kong. There was a connecting flight to Tasmania, and then that infamously turbulent voyage by boat southward. But once he arrived, the French station Dumont d’Urville immediately felt like home.

Michaël’s first stint in Antarctica was for 15 months, during which he became an expert on two seabird species: emperor and Adélie penguins. His main project was monitoring pairs of emperor penguins over their breeding season during the Austral winter.

“I still think emperor penguins are the most magical animals I’ve ever met,” Michaël says. “They are so graceful. Everything in their behavior is refined and subtle, in strong contrast to their tough and pugnacious neighbors, the Adélie penguins.”

For about 65 days, male emperor penguins incubate their single egg while fasting on the ice, while the females are foraging at sea. As he monitored the males, Michaël could sense the tension in the colony while, in the midst of the winter, they waited patiently for the females to come back.

“Finally, the females started coming back, and I could feel the relief of the males. Now you can breathe again, and you can go to the sea to find food for yourself and the chick,” he remembers. “Here I thought, that’s what I want to do with my life — I want to work with these incredible animals.”

Michaël returned to France and started a PhD program at the University of Strasbourg that would allow him to continue studying penguins. He again crossed the Austral Ocean — this time knowing what the journey would bring — and went back to Antarctica the following two Austral summers. For his PhD project, he focused his research on Adélies: how the males and females coordinate their parental roles, and how this is physiologically regulated. Because the ice conditions around the colony strongly differed between both field seasons, he also decided to compare how these environmental differences affected the penguins.

*Two emperor penguins walk through the blizzard to return to their colony. Photo taken by Michaël Beaulieu.*

Spreading his wings

Michaël was able to publish 10 papers based on his research in Antarctica. But, although he loved working with penguins, he did not want to be solely viewed as a "penguinologist,” and therefore sought to broaden his range of research experiences with wild animals. He got a postdoc position studying the Lincoln's sparrow, a melodic songbird that breeds at high latitude and altitude in North America. The project combined neurology and ethology to examine how females perceived male songs during the breeding season.

The position was based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but the fieldwork was in a meadow at 3,300 meters altitude in the Rocky Mountains. The original goal was to find and track Lincoln's sparrows, but about half of the birds the team caught were white-crowned sparrows, which made Michaël wonder whether members of these two species were competing for resources in the meadow. He shifted part of his research to explore this question.

“We had very interesting results that indeed showed that the larger white-crowned sparrows appear to out-compete the Lincoln’s sparrows when resources become limited on the meadow,” he says.

After the two-year postdoc in North Carolina, Michaël returned to Europe, where he was accepted for a prestigious Von Humboldt fellowship based in Freiburg, Germany, studying oxidative stress regulation in Gouldian finches in a lab setting.

“These are the most beautiful songbirds you can imagine,” Michaël says about these tropical finches, whose plumage is as vibrant as the colors of the rainbow.

From there, he went on to another lab research position at the University of Greifswald, one of the oldest institutions in Germany, studying how environmental conditions may affect the physiology and behavior of tropical butterflies. He also gave lectures and supervised research projects in this position, allowing him to teach and mentor students in addition to his research.

“That was the first time I was working with invertebrates,” he says. “Even though it felt strange to work with butterflies at first, that experience offered me the perfect setting to properly examine how animals may respond in the face of climate change.”

And then in 2018, Michaël found an opportunity to work with penguins again — without even having to leave northern Germany. The nearby German Ocean Museum in Stralsund was starting a project to learn about penguins’ hearing, based on animal training methods previously used with captive marine mammals. At that time, no one really knew if these methods were transposable to captive penguins. Michael joined on as the scientific coordinator of the project.

“Because penguins dive, sometimes very deep, their amphibious way of life could have affected the way they hear,” Michaël says. “It was something that was entirely unknown at the time and that was important to examine, given the increasing exposure of penguins to noisy conditions in their natural environment.”

The team was able to document several challenges related to training Humboldt penguins in captivity, and through their research they were surprised to find that penguins seem to be able to hear low-frequency sounds above water, even at low intensities.

*Michaël records Gentoo penguin vocalizations in Antarctica.*

Adventures of the mind

As part of the project on penguins’ hearing, Michaël had the opportunity to return twice to Antarctica to record penguins’ vocalizations in the field — once at the French Station he had called home 15 years prior, and once onboard a sailing ship where the few lucky passengers had the opportunity to lend him a hand to collect data. This latter experience gave him the idea that he could serve as a polar guide onboard larger cruise ships to reach more passengers and inform them about seabirds and the challenges they encounter in polar regions.

These last polar experiences as a naturalist guide both in Antarctica and in the Arctic almost prevented Michaël from joining WAI, as limited and unstable internet connection in these remote regions severely reduces any external communication. Fortunately, following a trip to the North Pole, Michaël had internet access for a few hours when the ship reached a port — just enough to apply and interview for a position.

He started as a Physiology Researcher with WAI in 2022, motivated by a desire to start closing the knowledge gap about wild animals’ subjective experiences as individuals.

“Even though humans have shared this planet with other animals for a very long time, we do not even know how most of these animals experience their lives,” Michaël says. “This is a huge gap in our knowledge if we want to better understand and protect the interests of our neighbors on Earth.”

During his time with WAI, Michaël has authored several peer-reviewed articles, mostly about the physiology and welfare of wild animals — but also to encourage scientific communities (including veterinarians) to get engaged in the field of wild animal welfare science. He has also led talks at several conferences and workshops to inform scientists around the world about what wild animal welfare science is and how their work could be relevant for the field.

“Being able to contribute to establishing an entirely new and mission-driven research field to better understand and protect wild animals is highly motivating,” he says. “It gives me the impression that I am making good use of my multidisciplinary background for a respectable and impactful cause.”