Assistant Professor of Marine Sciences Julie Granger has been awarded $791,496 over five years for her project, “The biological nitrogen isotope systematics of ammonium consumption and production.”

Granger’s work seeks to create a basis through which researchers can better understand the oceanic nitrogen cycle. Isotopic data can be useful to interpreting nitrogen cycle processes in the ocean that are difficult to measure directly. Granger’s research will investigate the processes behind isotope fractionation, or relative abundance, of ammonium during biological processes. It will investigate whether low concentrations of ammonium in the surface ocean affect isotope fractionation when the ammonium is recycled, and whether there is a trophic isotope effect associated with ammonium recycling by plankton.

The research will create a baseline from which researchers can interpret recycled nitrogen dynamics from ammonium isotope datasets, and will significantly enhance our ability to understand the ocean’s fundamental chemistry and its vulnerability to human impacts.

Granger also plans to integrate science with community-engaged learning by developing an undergraduate field and laboratory course requiring students to present their research to stakeholders in the community. A manual created for this course will be disseminated in open-access forums for teachers to develop similar courses.

Doctoral candidate Melissa Pierce received a second place award in the Student Spotlight Competition (5 slides, 3.5 minutes) at the international Aquaculture 2016 meeting.  She also received the Johnnie Castro Montealegre Award from the FUCOBI Foundation. The FUCOBI foundation is an international collaboration of researchers and NGO focused on “ONE HEALTH” – a program aimed at conserving healthy ecosystems to maintain biodiversity and healthy animals to protect human health.

 

Graduate student Matthew Sasaki, a first year Ph.D. student in Professor Hans Dam’s lab, will participate in the Antarctic Biology Training Program for Early Career Scientists in summer 2016. This elite program is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and aims to introduce participants to polar science under realistic field conditions, with the associated complexities and logistical challenges of undertaking science in Antarctica.

This year’s program focuses on integrative biology and biological adaptation of polar organisms to environmental change. Using a combination of laboratory, field, and ship-based projects, and led by a diverse team of instructors, the  course provides participants the opportunity to study a wide range of Antarctic organisms at several different levels of biological analysis spanning molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, ecology, and evolution.

Matthew is interested in the genetic control of the response of marine organisms to thermal stress, a topical issue for climate change research. Matthew says “this training program will be a great tool to help me design my doctoral dissertation and a unique opportunity for my professional development. I can’t wait to be there.”

 

Photo caption: UConn Marine Sciences Ph.D. student Matthew Sasaki while he was a student at University of California, San Diego.  Matthew will have to don warmer clothing for his trip to Antarctica.

UConn Marine Sciences professor Ann Bucklin and emeritus professor Peter Auster were among 600 marine experts from many countries who participated in the recent United Nation’s World Ocean Assessment (WOA), a global inventory of the state of the marine environment and problems threatening to degrade the oceans.  This just-released international study marks the first comprehensive analysis on the ways humans benefit from and affect the world’s oceans, which cover more than 70 percent of our planet.

Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon, in the introduction of the WOA, stated that based on the findings of the authors “… urgent action on a global scale is needed to protect the world’s oceans from the many pressures they face.”  For the United Nations, this first WOA highlights the importance of better managing the 70% of the ocean that is beyond national jurisdiction, known as the high seas.  Most important, the WOA will form the scientific foundation for negotiations to begin in March to modify the Convention on Law of the Sea.  The results will govern future of human uses of one-half of our planet.

http://today.uconn.edu/2016/02/state-of-the-worlds-oceans/

UConn marine scientist David Lund and his colleagues studied hydrothermal activity along the mid-ocean ridge system – the longest mountain range in the world, which extends some 37,000 miles along the ocean floor and found a link between hydrothermal activity and glacial cycles.

http://today.uconn.edu/2016/01/activity-on-seafloor-linked-to-icy-ebb-and-flow-on-surface/

Marine Sciences faculty Dr. Heidi Dierssen and her postdoctoral researchers Dr. Shungudzemwoyo Garaba and Dr. Kaylan Randolph are involved in an interdisciplinary airborne mission of carbon dynamics in the Southern Ocean (the ORCAS mission).  Dr. Garaba is currently aboard the R/V Lawrence Gould stationed along the Antarctic Peninsula to provide ground truth measurements of the hyperspectral imagery from the NASA PRISM sensor.

A recent article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by Heidi Dierssen, George McManus, and Senjie Lin of UConn’s marine sciences uses hyperspectral imagery from the space station to map a red tide ciliate bloom in Long Island Sound.  A summary for students appears in Science News: https://student.societyforscience.org/article/scientists-identify-plankton-space

Hans 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).

 

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/

Real-world problems in Wequetequock Cove that have been one of the challenges taken on by the citizen science group CUSH, or Clean Up Sound and Harbors, this fall turned into an opportunity for some marine science students.

http://www.theday.com/local/20151111/wequetequock-cove-becomes-lesson-for-avery-point-students