Michelle Risi

Michelle developed a deep appreciation for seabirds during her first expedition to Gough Island in 2014. Michelle grew up on the KZN north coast and completed her undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, specialising in marine biology. Her MSc focused on the phylogenetics of zoanthids, a group of understudied rocky shore invertebrates. 

Her initial year on Gough Island marked a turning point in her career, leading to more than a decade of fieldwork on remote and ecologically significant islands, including Gough, Marion and Aldabra Atoll. During this time, she contributed to a range of conservation projects, working alongside her husband, Chris Jones, with a particular focus on the impacts of invasive rodents on breeding seabirds. Michelle has authored and co-authored numerous publications, spanning novel behavioural observations and analyses of long-term datasets initiated by the FitzPatrick Institute.

During her first expedition to Marion Island, she cleaned and consolidated a four-decade dataset on Northern Giant Petrels. This work laid the foundation for her PhD, which she is currently pursuing at the Fitz under the supervision of A/Prof. Susan Cunningham, Prof. Peter Ryan, Prof. Richard Phillips and Dr. Steffen Oppel. Her research uses long-term population and individual-based datasets from multiple island colonies to investigate how environmental variability and human activities influence survival, recruitment and breeding success in giant petrels across the Southern Ocean. By integrating data across sites, her research aims to better understand population responses to global change and thus to inform conservation management.

Thesis: Drivers of seabird demography in a changing ocean: insights from long-term studies of giant petrels
Supervisors:  Prof. Emer. Peter Ryan, A/Prof. Susan Cunningham, Prof. Richard Phillips, Dr Steffen Oppel

Selected publications (see full list on ResearchGate)

Risi, M. M., Jones, C. W., Connan, M., Gill, R., Stephen, V., Cunningham, S. J., & Ryan, P. G. (2025). Escalating threats: house mouse attacks on adult wandering albatrosses spread across Marion Island. Biological Invasions.

Risi, M. M., Jones, C. W., Oppel, S., Bristol, C. A., O’Brien, M., Fleischer-Dogley, F., & Bunbury, N. (2025). Red-footed booby population thriving at globally significant Aldabra Atoll: insights from UAV surveys. Oryx.

Risi, M. M., Jones, C. W., Osborne, A. M., Steinfurth, A., & Oppel, S. (2021). Southern giant petrels depredating breeding Atlantic yellow-nosed albatrosses on Gough Island. Polar Biology, 44, 593–599.

Risi, M. M., & Macdonald, A. H. (2016). Molecular examination of rocky shore brachycnemic zoantharians (Anthozoa: Hexacorallia) and their Symbiodinium symbionts (Dinophyceae) in the southwest Indian Ocean. Marine Biodiversity, 46, 113-127.

Risi, M. M., & Macdonald, A. H. (2015). Possible synonymies of Zoanthus (Anthozoa: Hexacorallia) species on the east coast of South Africa with Pacific congeners. Systematics and Biodiversity, 13(1), 93-103.