Month: December 2018

2018 AGU Fall Meeting had high turnout by UConn Department of Marine Sciences

From December 10-14, 2018, students and faculty from the Department of Marine Sciences attended the 2018 AGU Fall Meeting in Washington D.C. This conference covers space, atmosphere, ocean, and earth sciences, as well as special sessions focusing on science policy, communication, and education. This year marked the start of AGU’s centennial, which introduced more unique programs. It is also one of the largest natural sciences conferences in the world, with an average attendance of 25,000 people.

The department’s presentations covered sea sprary chemistry, the Ocean Observatories Initiative, mercury in the Bering Sea, nutrient budgets in Long Island Sound, and more.

AGU 2018

Meta-analysis of silverside CO2 experiments published!

28 November 2018. Hannes, Emma, and Chris are happy to announce that Biology Letters just published our latest study, a meta-analysis of 20 standard CO2 exposure experiments conducted on Atlantic silverside offspring between 2012-2017. All these years of sustained experimental work resulted in the most robustly constrained estimates of overall CO2 effect sizes for a marine organism to date.

The study demonstrated:
A general tolerance of Atlantic silverside early life stages to pCO2 levels of ~2,000 µatm
A significant overall CO2 induced reduction of embryo and overall survival by -9% and -13%, respectively
The seasonal change in early life CO2 sensitivity in this species
The value of serial experimentation to detect and robustly estimate CO2 effects in marine organisms

Baumann, H., Cross, E.L., and Murray, C.S. Robust quantification of fish early life CO2 sensitivities via serial experimentation. Biology Letters 14:20180408