Month: November 2015

Professor Hans G. Dam Elected Fellow of Two Prestigious Scientific Associations – AAAS and ASLO

Hans DamHans G. Dam, a professor in the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Connecticut, has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society, and publisher of the journal Science.

Election as an AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers. Fellows are those whose efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished. As part of the Biological Sciences Section, Dam was elected as an AAAS Fellow for “distinguished contributions to the field of biological oceanography, particularly plankton carbon cycling and zooplankton evolutionary ecology.”

Professor Dam was also elected to the inaugural class of fellows of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO), the leading professional organization for researchers and educators in the field of aquatic science. Fellows are recognized for having achieved excellence in their contributions to ASLO and the aquatic sciences.

New AAAS Fellows will be recognized on Feb 13 during the 2016 AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. The 2015 ASLO Fellows will be honored at the ASLO Meeting in Santa Fe in June 2016.

Professor Dam joined the Department of Marine Sciences in 1991. He is widely published in scholarly journals in oceanography, marine biology and evolution. His current research interests are mechanistic understanding of plankton adaptation to global change. Professor Dam was previously elected a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (2007) and the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009).

 

Hiding in Plain Sight: Camouflage in Open Ocean Fish

There’s an evolutionary arms race going on offshore, but people can’t see it. That’s because human eyesight can’t pick up on polarized light waves.

UConn Today highlights a new study coauthored by associate professor Heidi Dierssen and graduate student Brandon Russell in Science: http://today.uconn.edu/2015/11/hiding-in-plain-sight-camouflage-in-open-ocean-fish/

Small But Mighty: The Astounding Genome of the Dinoflagellate

The dinoflagellates aren’t happy.

In good times, these tiny ocean creatures live free-floating in the ocean or symbiotically with corals, serving up—or as—lunch to a host of mollusks, tiny fish and coral species. Some of them make glowing waves at night because they are bioluminescent.

But when conditions are wrong dinoflagellates poison shellfish beds and cause coral reefs to die.

Read the complete UConn Today article by Kim Krieger here: http://today.uconn.edu/2015/11/small-but-mighty-the-astounding-genome-of-the-dinoflagellate/

This article was also featured on NSF’s Science 360 News webpage:  http://news.science360.gov/archives/20151109/