Month: March 2025

Harmony of Nature II: Music as a Tool for Science Communication

Posted on March 24, 2025March 25, 2025 by Hannes Baumann

Molly, a scientist and bass trombone player in the Southeastern Connecticut Community Orchestra, and Sophy, a pianist trained at The Juilliard School and a teacher at Yewon Arts School in Seoul, previously merged their passions to create Harmony of Nature phase I in 2022. The project transformed environmental data (temperature changes, wind speed, wave height, and tides) from the South Korean Meteorological Agency into sounds and classical compositions.

The project received a lot of positive feedback, especially following live performances. Motivated by this success, the team enlisted Max, a composer also trained at The Juilliard School and computer scientist, to help develop a second album. Like the first, Harmony of Nature II uses environmental data to generate musical compositions, but with a specific focus on wave data.

One piece, called honshu_east_all - tsunami, is composed from data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) buoy system during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. The piece features bell tones at intervals that correspond to the tsunami signal detected by the buoys as it traveled across the Pacific Ocean. Another composition, sea level rise, uses NOAA Tides & Currents buoy data from long-standing stations in NY and CT to explore sea level rise in Long Island Sound.

The goal of these compositions is to translate complex, non-intuitive environmental data into a deeper emotional connection to nature. While it can be difficult to quantitatively measure the exact impact on scientific literacy or audience actions, Molly notes that in-person feedback has been “very positive” with listeners expressing emotional connections and increased knowledge.

The team is already working on Harmony of Nature III, with a target release date sometime between 2025 and 2026. Currently, they are exploring datasets from the 2024 Atlantic Ocean hurricane season that brought devastation to the US including storms such as Beryl, Helene, and Milton. At the same time, they are also exploring data related to rapid Arctic environmental changes and glacial melt. Their future goals include expanding the instrumentation, recruiting more musicians for recordings and performances, and including researchers from other scientific fields.

“This exercise in collaboration and science communication presented me with opportunities to learn from my two teammates who have totally different skillsets from my own and who challenge my inclinations and training as a scientist. I am out of my comfort zone in all our meetings”, says Molly.

For her, the experiences with Harmony of Nature have offered multiple iterations of science communication training from communicating to Sophy and Max as well as to their intended audience. Molly adds that effective science communication, whether through music or other avenues, relies on understanding your audience, distilling your message, and avoiding jargon.

So far, Sophy has performed Harmony of Nature II at several venues in the US, including the Marc A. Scorca Hall at the National Opera Center in New York City (3/23/24), the Branford House at UConn Avery Point (3/27/24), and at the von der Mehden Hall at UConn Storrs (3/29/24).

Paper on ocean mercury fluxes in Science Advances

Posted on March 19, 2025 by Manning, Cara

Congratulations to UConn authors Yipeng He, Hannah Inman, and Robert Mason, as well as their collaborators, on their paper “Elevated methylmercury in Arctic rain and aerosol linked to air-sea exchange of dimethylmercury,” which was published in Science Advances on March 19!

From the authors:
The results of our study of mercury (Hg) dynamics in the Arctic in May/June 2021 further documented the potential of the ocean to be a source of dimethylmercury (DMHg) to the atmosphere under specific conditions, in this instance in conjunction with coastal upwelling. The study further showed that the fate of this DMHg is that it is converted in the atmosphere to methylmercury (MeHg), the most toxic and bioaccumulative form of Hg, which is then transported long distances in the atmosphere before being returned to the ocean in precipitation and through aerosol deposition leading to the potential contamination of fish and marine mammals in vulnerable ecosystems far from the DMHg source. The study determined the magnitude of the various fluxes involved in this transport to further quantify the importance of this pathway.

This research formed part of the thesis research of Yipeng He, the lead author, and was funded by NSF Polar Programs to Robert Mason and his co-PIs. Hannah Inman was also involved in the research study and is a co-author on the paper.

Photo 1: Yipeng He, Robert Mason, Marissa Despins, and Hannah Inman on the Arctic research expedition.

Figure 2: Graphical depiction of the processes demonstrating how the evasion of dimethylmercury (DMHg) to the atmosphere results in its conversion to methylmercury (MMHg) which is then redeposited to the ocean via precipitation and aerosol deposition far from the source.

Figure 3: The associated estimated fluxes of methylated mercury (MeHg) into or out of the ocean for the various Arctic locations studied showing the net transport of MeHg from the DMHg source region to other ocean regions.

“Just keep swimming: challenges in PhD research”

Posted on March 8, 2025March 11, 2025 by Hannes Baumann

The ole adage holds true for DMS graduate student Emma Siegfried’s first experiments on a new species of sand lance

By Samantha Rush and Hannes Baumann

In 1984, the late Alphonse Smigielski and colleagues published a research paper that showed how American sand lance (Ammodytes americanus) could be successfully spawned and reared in the laboratory. Now, DMS PhD student Emma Siegfried is working to continue experimental research on this species, finding that revisiting the 40 year old study is not without challenges.

Sand lances are so called forage fish, meaning that their role in the ecosystem is to eat tiny planktonic organisms while being important food themselves for higher trophic animals such as other fish, seabirds, and marine mammals. Despite their importance, there is insufficient information about how this species will cope to climate change, particularly during the most sensitive larval and embryo stages. To fill this knowledge gap, Emma’s work focuses on exploring how increasing water temperatures and carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels affect sand lance embryos and larvae.

Previous research conducted in Prof. Hannes Baumann’s Evolutionary Fish Ecology lab discovered that embryos of the closely related Northern sand lance (Ammodytes dubius) are extremely sensitive to elevated CO₂ levels, as they are projected to occur in future oceans. However, whether American sand lance are equally CO₂ sensitive is not known.

Emma’s thesis research began in 2024 by first trying to find a reliable and easy to access location, where the species could be found and collected. In the harbor of the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve in Wells, Maine, she found what she needed, because her fish occurred in high numbers there and could be sampled at low tide easily via beach seine. Now Emma’s goal was to catch the fish as close as possible prior to their spawning season, which in the case of sand lance starts with the beginning of winter.

In late August and early October 2024, Emma and her lab mates successfully collected sand lance and transported them live to the Rankin Seawater at Avery Point. There, however, sand lance proved challenging to care for, as they prefer spending days to weeks burrowed in sand (hence their name), making it difficult to monitor their health and development. Subsequent sampling efforts in November and early December brought a new set back, because the previously accessible population in Wells Harbor had evidently moved into slightly deeper waters and thereby out of reach for the beach seine. Unfazed, Emma proceeded to rear the fish she already had in the lab, hoping that they would ripen and eventually produce embryos for a CO₂-sensitivity experiment.

At first, this looked like another failure. Sand lance use the declining temperature as a cue to ripen, but the waters of eastern Long Island Sound that flow through the Rankin lab remained unseasonably warm well into December. Eventually, however, on 23 December 2024, water temperatures crossed the critical 7°C threshold, and 3 days later, Emma and her lab mates indeed succeeded in strip-spawning a few ripened up females! The fertilized embryos were then placed in the Automatic Larval Fish Rearing System (ALFiRiS) that allows computer-controlled exposure of organisms to different temperature and CO₂ conditions.

Unfortunately, more experimental setbacks followed. Less than 1% of the embryos actually developed to hatch, the CO₂-induced acidification did not produce the desired target pH levels, and a system malfunction remained undetected long enough to raise water temperatures to unnatural levels. Emma remains positive, however, and looks at her trials and tribulations as well as the preliminary data as a valuable exercise in gathering experience with this new, non-model species.

“Even though it didn’t go the way we expected, [we] still learned a lot.” she says.

She added that science is by definition challenging, but she is eager to apply what she has learned and move forward. More generally, her thesis research aims to answer the question whether CO₂-sensitivity is a shared trait among sand lance species. To that end, she is applying for a grant to collaborate with researchers in Bergen, Norway who have experience with another, closely related sand lance species (Lesser sand eel, Ammodytes marinus). She hopes to secure funding to travel and conduct research there from December 2025 through March 2026.