Month: December 2024

Summary of Summer/Fall 2024 Departmental Achievements

Posted on December 2, 2024December 2, 2024 by Hannes Baumann

Awards:

Professor Samantha Siedlecki

Prof. Siedlecki was named as a 2024 – 2025 Fullbright Scholar for research in both Italy and South Africa, which has been featured at UConn Today

Professor Hans Dam

Professor Dam had the honor of giving the Maxilliped Lecture on “Copepods as Model Systems for the Study of the Response of the Biota to Global Change” during the 15th International Conference on Copepoda held in Hiroshima, Japan.

Research Faculty Sandra Shumway

Dr. Shumway was awarded the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award by the US Aquaculture Society and is the first female to receive the award. She was also appointed Fellow of the Marine Biological Association, FMBA. MBA Fellows are senior practitioners in marine biology who have contributed to the discipline at the highest level. The title of Fellow of the Marine Biological Association, FMBA, was first awarded in 2014, following granting of a Royal Charter to the Marine Biological Association. There are currently 50 MBA Fellows.

Professor Senjie Lin

Professor Lin has been awarded the 2024 UConn-AAUP Excellence Award in as well as the 2024 Alumni Faculty Excellence Award in Research and Creativity.

PhD student Paxton Tomko

Paxton was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF-GRFP) for research with Professor Pieter Visscher, which was featured at UConn Today

PhD Candidate Halle Berger

Halle was awarded the 2024 National Marine Fisheries-Sea Grant Fellowship by NOAA making her the first UConn student to ever receive the award.

Grants:

Professor Senjie Lin

Prof Lin will collaborate with the University of Columbia and Yale University on a DARPA-funded multi-year (2024-2027) project that aims to utilize algal genomics to develop biosensors for various environmental stimuli

MEBES: Modular engineered biosensors for environmental sensing

Research Professor Paola Batta-Lona, Professor Hannes Baumann

Led by UConn EEB professor Eric Schultz, co-PIs Batta-Lona and Baumann will collect and analyze novel data on short- and long-term changes in the trophic ecology of species of greatest conservation need.

Bottoming Out? Testing Hypotheses on Why Long Island Sound Flatfishes Are Disappearing (Long Island Sound Study, $316,667).

Professor Heidi Dierssen and Research Professor Paola Batta-Lona

In collaboration with colleagues from URI, Dierssen and Batta-Lona will use eDNA to characterize biological communities in shallow seafloor, deep-sea seafloor, and offshore midwater acoustic soundscapes. Additionally remote sensing data and Distributed Sensing enabled Cabled Observatories (DiSCO’s) will be used for broader scale understanding of major ocean processes in these areas.

Coastal and Offshore Biogeochemical Oceanographic Observatories Enabled with Distributed Sensing (NIUVT, $2,126,000)

Research Scientist Zhuomin Chen

Projecting future changes in the Gulf Stream warm-core rings and their impacts on the Northeast U.S. Large Marine Ecosystem in a changing climate using regional MOM6 simulations (NOAA $570,000)

Publications:

Prof. Hans Dam

Prof. Dam co-authored a study about the negative effects of marine heatwaves on copepods. The authors found that acclimation (“getting used to”) and parental effects (“the fate of the children depends on the experience of the parents”) mitigate the negative effects of heat waves on the fitness of two important copepod species.

Sasaki, M.C, M. Finiguerra, H.G. Dam. 2024. Seasonally variable thermal performance curves prevent adverse effects of heatwaves. Journal of Animal Ecology 2024;00:1–11. DOI: 10.1111/1365-2656.14221

Graduate student Samantha Rush and Professor Penny Vlahos

This study reports on how sea ice in the Arctic Ocean incorporates and stores boron as it forms, reducing the amount of boron from under ice waters.

Rush, S., Vlahos, P., Lee, C.-H., Lee, K., Barrett, L. J. Boron to salinity ratios in the Fram Strait entering the Central Arctic: The role of sea ice formation and future predictions. Marine Chemistry. 267:104463. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marchem.2024.104463

DMS alumnus Max Zavell and Professor Hannes Baumann

Zavell and Baumann show that the embryos and larvae of an abundant grouper species in Long Island Sound are unaffected by even very high CO2 levels in the water.

Zavell, M.D. and Baumann, H. (2024) Resiliency of Black Sea Bass, Centropristis striata, early life stages to future high CO2 conditions. Environmental Biology of Fishes 107:677–691

Research Prof. Paola Batta-Lona and Prof. Ann Bucklin

This morphological and molecular analysis revealed the diet differences of 7 mesopelagic fish species, showing the importance of gelatinous prey.

Bucklin, A., Batta-Lona, P.G., Questel, J., McMonagle, H., Wojcicki, M., Llopiz, J.K., Glancy, S., Caiger, P.E., Francolini, R., Govindarajan, A., Thorrold, S.R., Jech, M., Wiebe, P.H. (2024). Metabarcoding and morphological analysis of diets of mesopelagic fishes in the NW Atlantic Slope water. Front Mar Sci. 11:1411996. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2024.1411996

Batta-Lona also published a study on the diet diversity of three salp species, which showed a wide variety of prey, broadening our understanding of trophic pathways in the mesopelagic food web.

Batta-Lona, P.G., Gardner, K., Questel, J.M., Thorrold, S.R., Llopiz, J.L., Wiebe, P.H., Bucklin, A. (2024). Salps in the NW Atlantic Slope Water: metabarcoding and compound-specific stable isotope analysis of diet diversity and trophic interactions. Mar Biol 171, 233. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-024-04535-x

Batta-Lona further published a study that identified parrot fish larvae via morphology and DNA sequences.

Morales‐Pulido, J. M., Galindo‐Sánchez, C. E., Jiménez‐Rosenberg, S. P. A., Batta‐Lona, P. G., Herzka, S. Z., Arteaga, M. C. (2024). A molecular approach to identify parrotfish (Sparisoma) species during early ontogeny. Journal of Fish Biology 1-10 https://doi.org/10.1111/jfb.15921

Batta-Lona was also involved in the MetaZooGene Atlas and Database (MZGdb) provides DNA sequences for multiple genes, with unique capacity for searches by ocean region.

O'Brien, T., Blanco-Bercial, L., Questel, J.M., Batta-Lona, P.G., Bucklin, A. (2024). MetaZooGene Atlas and Database: Reference Sequences for Marine Ecosystems. Methods in molecular biology 2744: 475-489. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3581-0_28

Prof. Peter Auster

Prof. Auster used diver surveys of reef fish off Florida to map predation risk to coral eating fishes.

Auster, P.J. and M.E. Cullerton. 2024. Can variation in fish predator density and the Landscape of Fear facilitate coral restoration success? Reef Encounter 39:48-50.

In another study, Prof. Auster and colleagues argue that the term "destructive fishing" is used in international agreements and guidance without agreement on what this term means.

McCarthy, A.H., D. Steadman, H. Richardson, J. Murphy, S. Benbow, J.I. Brian, H. Brooks, G. Costa-Domingo, C. Hazin, C. McOwen, J. Walker, D. Willer, M. Abdi, P.J. Auster, ..., N. Mukherjee. 2024. Destructive fishing: An expert‐driven definition and exploration of this quasi‐concept. Conservation Letters, e13015. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.13015

Graduate student Danielle Freeman

Danielle published an article together with colleagues at WHOI that forecasts the effects of sunlight-driven chemistry during oil spills.

Freeman, D. H.; Nelson, R. K.; Pate, K.; Reddy, C. M.; Ward, C. P. (2024) Forecasting Photo-Dissolution for Future Oil Spills at Sea: Effects of Oil Properties and Composition. Environ Sci Technol. 58: 15236-15245 https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.4c05169

A delayed spring bloom along the West Antarctica Peninsula

Posted on December 2, 2024December 2, 2024 by Hannes Baumann

By Samantha Rush.

If you think about the holiday season, it is easy to grasp the trend that Christmas festivities that used to begin traditionally after Thanksgiving in the US appear much earlier. In recent years, the timeline has shifted and many Christmas and holiday themed advertisements, decorations, and events appear even sooner than before. Of course, this notable shift has traceable causes and is known (consciously or subconsciously) to be driven by retail strategies, commercialization, consumer behavior, social media influences, and cultural shifts.

The changes in the timelines of global phenomena also extend to marine environments. In fact, the polar regions are some of the most rapidly changing locations on the planet due to human induced climate change. In the West Antarctic Peninsula (Figure 1), a combination of warming and sea ice loss have altered the timing of recurring seasonal events, the study of which is known as phenology. While most predictions have suggested that these changes in the environment would cause an earlier spring bloom, or ocean biology to kick start, lead author and postdoctoral researcher Jessie Turner found exactly the opposite in a recent study of the ice-associated waters west of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Using satellite ocean color data from 1997 to 2022, researchers from the University of Connecticut and five other collaborating institutions and laboratories discovered that spring blooms were shifting later in ice zones and on continental shelf regions west of the Antarctic Peninsula (Figure 2). By using satellite derived chlorophyll-a concentrations as a proxy for phytoplankton biomass, researchers were able to track the concentration and timing of the elevated concentration corresponding to the date when heightened biological activity begins.

After investigating a handful of environmental variables to better ascertain the potential mechanisms for the seasonal shift, the authors found that wind speed was the most likely mechanism for the observed change in the spring bloom start date. Other variables such as light and temperature did not explain the trends. However, there was a long-term increase in wind mixing, which likely decreases the stability of the water column in the early spring season and suppresses phytoplankton accumulation until later in the season (Figure 3).

While phytoplankton are small single cell plants, the timing of the phytoplankton spring bloom affects the entire marine food web. Higher trophic level organisms may experience feeding, migration, and breeding impacts. In fact, phenology changes at the base of the Antarctic food web are likely to disrupt the life history of key species such as Adélie penguins. Other, widespread impacts also include potential changes to the timing and magnitude of carbon dioxide absorption by the ocean in these locations.

Next, the researchers plan to investigate specific phytoplankton species and employ the use of new generation hyperspectral satellite missions to further study long-term trends in polar regions. Rapidly developing technology combined with field measurements will allow for better examinations of the changes rapidly occurring in this polar region in studies to come.

Jessica S. Turner, J.S., Dierssen, H., Kim, H.H., Stammerjohn, S., Munro, D.R., and Kavanaugh, M. (2024). Changing phytoplankton phenology in the marginal ice zone west of the Antarctic peninsula. Marine Ecology Progress Series 734: 1–21

Meet DMS alumnus Dr. Chris Murray

Posted on December 2, 2024December 2, 2024 by Hannes Baumann

Samantha: I appreciate you taking the time to do this interview. Can you briefly share some of the highlights from your time at UConn?

Chris: I came to UConn in 2014 joining Dr. Baumann’s lab when he was just starting as a first-year faculty member. My research focused on the effects of climate stressors on fish, particularly in their early life stages. We did experiments exposing fish to climate change stressors like acidification, warming, and hypoxia, which laid the groundwork for many future studies and my work today. At the time, the research was novel, and I got to build the lab alongside Hannes. Avery Point was great for its diversity of undergraduates and young scientists incorporated into research as well as its diversity of research foci from all the different major oceanographic topics.

Samantha: Now, I found that you did your bachelor's in business administration and management. Can you tell me how you made the shift to becoming an oceanography PhD student?

Chris: I was a naive first-generation college student, and when I struggled with biology and chemistry, I just switched to business. By my senior year, I realized it wasn’t for me, but I had matured academically to know what to do to get to the next step and I morphed my business administration degree into environmental science with a capstone project. I still lacked practical science experience though, so the summer before graduate school, I volunteered extensively with local science groups and universities. When contacting graduate programs, many told me I wasn’t competitive for the program, but I found the Marine Policy and Conservation Program at Stony Brook School of Marine Sciences geared towards non-science majors. There, I met Hannes, who was an adjunct professor, and I ended up working with him as a master’s student. It was pure serendipity that I had been there at that moment to get the position! When Hannes moved to UConn, he offered me a PhD position to start his lab, and it was a no brainer! In all, it was a combination of stick-to-itiveness, luck, being in the right place at the right time, seeing opportunities that evolved, and taking advantage of them!

Samantha: After your PhD, what has your career path looked like?

Chris: During my PhD, I applied for a postdoc at Friday Harbor Labs with the University of Washington (UW), but I didn’t get it. However, in the same email, I was offered a 12-month postdoc at the Washinton Ocean and Certification Program to design a project without preconceived notions. I took that and ran! I established awesome collaborations at UW, University of Western Washington, Northwest Fishery Science Center, and USGS Fish Health and Wildlife Center. I did awesome things I never dreamed I would do when I was an undergraduate. It was a risk going out there, but that leap of faith was the most awesome thing I have ever done for my growth.

Samantha: What a cool adventure! So, what’s your current position?

Chris: As my postdoc ended, I was offered a permanent research position at UW, but I had looked for opportunities back east and found that Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) offered a Postdoctoral Scholars Program. Again, I was not selected, but I was also encouraged to write a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship proposal, which ultimately got funded. Considering I never sold my girlfriend-now-wife to a permanent position in Washington, we moved back east. My postdoc at WHOI was an incredible fellowship opportunity, and once that ended, I applied for tenure track faculty jobs. I had varying success, but WHOI didn’t want to lose me, so I was offered my now permanent research job in biology.

Samantha: I also heard you were recently offered a faculty position at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science at the Chesapeake Biological Lab. What led to your decision to decline the offer?

Chris: It was a dream job for me, but my wife and I found out we’re having a baby and our families are here in Cape Cod. We have a lot of ties to this area, so moving away didn’t feel like the right choice for us right now. It’s a tough reality of academic life- being willing to jump around the country to various opportunities- but with everything we have here, it made more sense to stay. I’m confident this won’t be my only opportunity.

Samantha: That is such a thoughtful decision. It is great to hear how you’re balancing career and personal life. So, what advice do you have for current graduate students?

Chris: Seriously consider your long-term plans, especially as you approach the second half of your degree. You can do a lot now to set yourself up for the next step. It’s true that there aren’t millions of jobs, but if you have a sober idea about what you want, taking steps towards it can make transitions smoother. Also, keep in mind that there are still more opportunities available than you can ever appreciate. Even rejected proposals can be reformatted. The endeavor is always really worth it, at least in my experience.

Samantha: Fantastic advice! And just for fun- what do you enjoy doing outside of research?

Chris: Basically, all the outdoor activities- hiking, snorkeling, scuba diving, backpacking, kayaking, fishing. I don’t have all those options on the Cape, but I have more time to enjoy them than I did as a graduate student.

Samantha: That’s awesome! Thanks again for sharing your story and advice, Chris. It was great chatting with you!