Although the academic year is over by mid-May, the Department of Marine Sciences does not take a summer vacation. Outreach, research trips, summer interns, and more activities keep Marine Sciences bustling during the summertime. Included here are just a few of the programs from summer 2019.

 

Marine Sciences and Mystic Aquarium REU program

This year marked the last class in the inaugural cycle of our new NSF funded Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) program with the Mystic Aquarium. Our REU students came from all corners of the country: California, Florida, Iowa, and Maine. Eight REU students were paired with Marine Sciences Faculty or Mystic Aquarium researchers on projects that spanned all levels of the marine food web. The program provides students with housing, a stipend for working full-time in a lab and for food, and all transportation. The students just focus on conducting science! This year featured new collaborative projects between DMS and the Aquarium, such as the first ever documentation of ciliate diversity and population dynamics of Beluga Whale blowhole spit. The Marine Sciences Graduate Student Organization also integrated itself into the REU program by providing invaluable peer support for oral and poster presentation experience. After a laudatory site visit by the NSF program manager, we were encouraged to apply for another four years of funding and to increase the number of students to 10. Our fingers are crossed we can continue this exciting and rewarding program.

 

STEM Success and Student Support Services

STEM Success, the undergraduate retention program for incoming Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM) students, returned this summer! Fourteen in-coming undergraduate students enrolled, who are either first-generation college students, from low-income households, part of underrepresented populations within UConn, or in need of some extra academic support.

For four weeks, students participated in eight workshops, twice-a-week, that were designed to promote discussion amongst peers and with graduate students on STEM subjects and life at Avery Point. Activities ranged from performing titrations, carrying out plankton tows, introducing programming, and learning how to use a microscope. This enabled the incoming undergraduates to become familiar with basic scientific concepts and laboratory etiquette, readying them for their science classes this Fall. The primary goal was to add another layer of support for these students by fostering connections with their peers and their future teaching assistants.

For the second year in a row, the STEM Success program occurred alongside the intensive five-week Student Support Services summer program directed by Aaron Collins. Twice as many marine sciences graduate students got involved this year to lead the workshops. STEM Success has been designed and coordinated by Dr. Emma Cross the previous two years and she is now handing over the reins to Dr. Lisa Nigro. Our graduate students were super enthusiastic and all the incoming first-years enjoyed and found the program useful!

 

Pre-college at Avery Point

The Department of Marine Sciences participated in UConn’s pre-college summer program for the second time. The program, titled “marine biology and oceanography” enrolled 17 students from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Saudi Arabia (by way of New Hampshire). The students stayed in Storrs and were transported to Avery Point during the week. Students’ favorite activities included taking water quality measurements around Pine Island off the R/V Lowell Weicker, exploring invertebrate ecology from settling plates, going on a behind the scenes tour of the Aquarium, and dissecting dogfish. Instructors were Claudia Koerting and John Hamilton. The program ran the last full week of July.

 

UConn Summer Undergraduate Research Fund (SURF) Awards

Each summer, UConn awards close to 50 undergraduates with financial support to explore a research project of their own device through the Summer Undergraduate Research Fund (SURF). Over the last few years, Marine Sciences undergraduate students have consistently received recognition. This year, seniors Mackenzie Blanusa and Annalee Mears were fully funded for summer research. Mackenzie combined atmospheric science and chemical analysis in her project entitled, “The Effect of Storm Type and Source Region on the Chemical Composition of Precipitation along the Long Island Sound Coastline.” Dr. Kelly Lombardo and Dr. Zofia Baumann mentored and guided her research. Annalee worked with Dr. Catherine Matassa on a project about predator-prey interactions called, “Stoichiometry of Fear: Do Predators Affect the Balance of Carbon and Nitrogen in their Prey?” Previous SURF recipients include Clare Schlink (2018), Sarah McCart (2017) and Jessica Hinckley (2019). We are proud of our undergraduates for their great contributions!

Since the last newsletter edition, many members of the Department of Marine Sciences were awarded grants, published articles, and received fellowships and awards. Congratulations to everyone on their remarkable achievements! All are presented in alphabetical order by last name.

Publications:

Hannes Baumann	Contrasting genomic shifts underlie parallel phenotypic evolution in response to fishing.
Zofia Baumann	Chapter 5: Ocean Transport of Radioactive Materials. Section 10: “Radioactive caesium in marine migratory animals.”
Ann Bucklin and Heidi Yeh	Time-series metabarcoding analysis of zooplankton diversity of the NW Atlantic continental shelf.
Heidi Dierssen	Evaluating the seasonal and decadal performance of red band difference algorithms for chlorophyll in an optically complex estuary with winter and summer blooms.   Water column optical properties of Pacific coral reefs across geomorphic zones and in comparison to offshore waters.   Pushing the limits of seagrass remote sensing in the turbid waters of Elkhorn Slough, California.   Modeling atmosphere-ocean radiative transfer: a PACE Mission perspective.   Atmospheric correction of satellite ocean-color imagery during the PACE Era   Retrieving aerosol characteristics from the PACE Mission, Part 1: ocean color instrument.   Retrieving aerosol characteristics from the PACE Mission, Part 2: multi-angle and polarimetry.
Felipe Porto	Long Non-Coding RNA Expression Levels Modulate Cell-Type-Specific Splicing Patterns by Altering Their Interaction Landscape with RNA-Binding Proteins.
Matthew Sasaki and Hans Dam	Integrating patterns of thermal tolerance and phenotypic plasticity with population genetics to improve understanding of vulnerability to warming in a widespread copepod.
Emily Seelen and Rob Mason	The interaction of mercury and methylmercury with chalcogenide nanoparticles.
Samantha Siedlecki	Observational needs supporting marine ecosystems modeling and forecasting. (accepted)   Cloud and radiative effects of a Northeast Pacific marine heat wave. (accepted)   An enhanced ocean acidification observing network: from people to technology to data synthesis and information exchange.   Better regional ocean observing through cross-national cooperation: a case study from the Northeast Pacific.
Samantha Siedlecki and Penny Vlahos	Carbon cycling in the North American coastal ocean: a synthesis.
Pieter Visscher	Carbonate precipitation in freshwater cyanobacterial biofilms forming microbial tufa.
J. Evan Ward	Selective ingestion and egestion of plastic particles by the blue mussel (Mytilus edulis) and eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica): implications for using bivalves as bioindicators of microplastic pollution.

 Fellowships:

Mackenzie Blanusa and Annalee Mears	UConn Summer Undergraduate Research Fund (SURF)
Elisabeth (Lissa) Giacalone	Dominion Energy student internship, working in environmental compliance at Millstone Power Station, Waterford, CT
Vena Haynes	Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the UConn Graduate School
Gunnar Hansen	Doctoral Student Travel Fellowship from the UConn Graduate School
Abigail Kwiat	NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates through University of Chicago Marine Biological Laboratory at the Plum Island Ecosystem Long Term Ecological Research site
Kayla Mladinich	Doctoral Student Travel Fellowship from the UConn Graduate School

Grants:

Julie Granger and Samantha Siedlecki	Investigation of mechanisms leading to seasonal hypoxia in the Southern Benguela Upwelling System.
Rob Mason	Collaborative Research: Constraining the role of chemical transformations in the cycling of mercury in the Arctic Ocean air-sea interface.
Samantha Siedlecki	Assessment of the observing network to identify processes relevant to the predictability of the coastal ocean of the Northeast on centennial time scales, NOAA OAP.
Pieter Visscher	2019-2020 Synchrotron Soleil/CNRS-CEA: Spatial distribution of metals in microbialites as biosignatures: Linking the modern to the fossil record and search for life on Mars. Visscher (PI), Bouton (Co-PI); Fifteen shifts of beamtime in the Nanoscopium, Synchrotron Soleil, Paris, France.

 Awards:

Ann Bucklin

Outstanding Achievement Award at ICES Annual Science Conference.

 

Stories about the impact of plastic pollution on marine organisms have been flooding the news with upsetting images of sea turtles with plastic straws stuck in their nostrils, and whales dying with tons of plastic in their stomachs. Besides large animals, plastic is potentially harming the creatures that wind up on our dinner plate, like bivalve shellfish. Bivalves filter ocean water to eat plankton, which suggests they are ingesting small plastic particles, called microplastics, every time they feed.

Researchers in UConn’s Department of Marine Sciences recently conducted a study exploring how common, commercial bivalves interact with microplastics when filter feeding. Ph.D. students Kayla Mladinich and Tyler Griffin, working with Professor J. Evan Ward, collected eastern oysters and blue mussels from Long Island Sound for laboratory experiments, in which they were exposed to plastic spheres and/or plastic threads of different sizes.

For spheres, their findings show that both mussels and oysters always reject the largest-sized plastic spheres, but ingest and expel smaller ones. For threads, however, there was not a clear pattern between rejection or ingestion, and length.

Mladinich explains, “Bivalves are selective feeders. While they can capture particles of various sizes and shapes on their gills, they will not eat everything they are exposed to. They can ingest or reject certain particles based on the size, shape, and surface properties.”

Dr. Ward and his lab group have shown that bivalves are not passively ingesting all types of plastics, rather the size and shape of the plastic matter a lot. This finding has implications for using bivalves as bioindicators for plastic pollution in the ocean.

Bioindicators are species used to represent the concentrations of pollutants and contaminants in an environment. In the ocean, bivalves are already utilized to monitor and determine levels of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), which can cause a variety of diseases in humans.

According to the World Health Organization, the most commonly encountered POPs are pesticides, industrial chemicals, and unintentional by-products of many industrial processes, such as DDT, PCB and PCDD, respectively. Recently, some scientists suggest also using bivalves as bioindicators for plastics pollution in the ocean.

According to the Ward lab, the criteria for a good microplastics bioindicator species include (1) being ubiquitous and relatively easy to collect; (2) interacting significantly with the surrounding environment through particle-feeding processes; and (3) ingesting, without bias, the majority of plastic particles in the environment.

Therefore, says Mladinich, “We should reconsider using bivalves as bioindicators for microplastics pollution, because as this study shows they capture, ingest, and reject plastic particles differentially. Bivalves are not consuming particles passively; they have selection mechanisms and bias.”

“If you went out and opened up a mussel or oyster and counted all the types and sizes of microplastic particles, you would not be getting an accurate representation of the microplastic load in that area,” added Griffin. “We should investigate other filter feeders that better satisfy our criteria.”

Unfortunately, mussels and oysters do not follow these criteria because they selectively consume some microplastics over others. Additional studies suggest that most plastics do not accumulate in shellfish tissues because they are readily eliminated on short timescales.  “Our study supports the idea that many plastic particles encountered by bivalves are either rejected prior to ingestion or rapidly egested in feces, so the instantaneous microplastic body burden of the animals is low,” explains Dr. Ward. Nonetheless, long-term effects of a low microplastic body burden in bivalves are not yet known.

More experiments are being conducted by Dr. Ward and his students that explore the impacts of microplastics on the gut microbiome of mussels, the selection of microscopic fibers depending on size and polymer type, and other topics.

Prior to the launch of the original R/V Connecticut in 1998, the University had operated a former U.S. Army-Transport boat (a T-441) acquired from Scripps Institution in 1969 and renamed the R/V UConn. Because it had a limited capacity for research instrumentation, it only spent about 20 days per year at sea. To develop modern marine research, the Department of Marine Sciences (DMS) and the former Marine Sciences and Technology Center eventually proposed a purpose-built coastal research vessel.

In 1996, Roger Long and the Elliott Bay Design Group designed the R/V Connecticut followed by construction in the fall of 1997. J. Turner Cabaniss, our current Marine Operations Manager, was hired in 1998 as captain and to provide onsite supervision of the construction. The boat’s design and construction were funded by state economic development funds through a state agency called Connecticut Innovations in addition to a loan from the University. The original R/V Connecticut was a 76’ research vessel with 12 bunks and a small lab space. It was equipped for heavy-duty oceanographic research with features like a stern A-frame for lifting buoys and a deck crane. It could house 7 scientists and 5 crew members and spent about 125 days at sea a year; being repeatedly chartered by other research institutions and federal agencies including NOAA, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the University of Maine.

The vessel operates as a university service center that is largely self-supporting through funding from federal agencies, making it realistic for UConn to house the boat, charter it to other researchers, and use for DMS research. The R/V Connecticut is well traveled along the east coast, particularly in Long Island Sound and Gulf of Maine waters. It has even spent some time in the great lakes, when Dr. Bob Ballard chartered the vessel for ROV work in the Thunder Bay NOAA Marine Sanctuary. To support Ballard’s work, NOAA provided funds to incorporate dynamic positioning into the R/V Connecticut’s existing propulsion. Dynamic positioning works through a computer integration of the bow and stern thrusters to maintain the boat’s position above ground. For a small research vessel, this is an extraordinary feature.

However, more recently the ship’s limited bunk and lab space proved to be an obstacle for larger collaborations and research expeditions. According to Dr. James O’Donnell, this was apparent during projects like the LISICOS program (Long Island Sound Integrated Coastal Observing System, 2004-2006), a large interdisciplinary estuarine project with more than a dozen researchers involved. People had to be shuttled on and off the ship throughout an expedition to meet project needs. With funding from the Provost and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the R/V Connecticut was refitted in 2017, with the addition of a 14′ mid-body extension, making it a 90’ vessel. The ship now holds double the lab space and 18 bunks for 5 crew members, a technician, and 12 scientists. The refitted boat is already benefiting DMS’s education program in the form of a graduate level course for ocean expeditions and will allow for greater collaboration opportunities at UConn and other marine research programs.

Read more about the recommissioning here

After a 13-year stint working on nuclear reactors for the US Navy, Bob has been our marine research technician in the machine shop for 26 years. After Gary Grenier’s retirement in 2017, he now has to manage the workload in the shop himself. Bob simply describes his day-to-day job as “fix and repair,” which is an understatement. Without his skills, the Department of Marine Sciences (DMS) would be at a loss.

As a trained machinist, Bob has contributed to a majority of DMS research projects by helping faculty design, build, and test prototype equipment, while also maintaining and repairing it when it breaks. Earlier during his tenure, Bob also enjoyed servicing the departments’ small submersibles and remotely operated vehicles (ROV), which required particular care due to the nature of high-pressure equipment. Over the years, he helped shape the machine shop into the highly functional facility that it is today.

Major experimental setups like the flow-through system in the Rankin Seawater Lab were constructed with Bob’s input and hard work. Bob also helped building the Larval Fish Rearing System that allows experimental manipulations of water temperature, CO₂ and oxygen levels to study potential effects of marine climate change on marine organisms. In Bob’s spare time, he helps other technicians with repairs on our marine vessels and teaching laboratories. Outside the machine shop, Bob’s friends and family value his mechanical skills.

DMS research operations rely on Bob’s expertise to construct prototypes and conserve functional equipment. As a department we fortunate to have such a skilled and caring technician.

 

On October 17-19, 2018, six graduate students from Department of Marine Sciences participated in the first ocean expedition course ever offered by the university. Students have long lobbied for a course that teaches ship-based oceanographic methods, and after much logistical and scientific preparation by faculty, staff, and students, the team set sail aboard the R/V Connecticut. The objective of the cruise was to sample oceanographic data from Long Island Sound outwards to the continental shelf break. The team was led by Professors Jim O’Donnell, Frank Bohlen, Samantha Siedlecki, and Hannes Baumann, with research support from Kay Howard-Strobel and David Cohen. The student participants were Molly James, Jimmy deMayo, Alec Shub, Michael Mathuri, Amin Ilia, and Callie Concannon.

The course was designed to give students a chance to experience data collection aboard a research vessel from all oceanographic disciplines. Students oversaw around-the-clock deployment of CTD/rosette casts, sediment grabs/cores, Methot net trawls, and vertical plankton tows at a total of 7 stations. On board the ship, students analyzed pH and prepared samples for later analysis. Unfortunately, weather conditions limited the trip to just 36 hours instead of the intended 48 hours, but the team still managed to collect the data they intended to analyze. With the help of Dr. Claudia Koerting, students used analytical spectroscopy techniques to measure dissolved oxygen, nutrients, and chlorophyll concentration. After all the data was analyzed, the final cruise report was constructed, and the results were presented the following semester at the weekly Brown Bag seminar series hosted by the Marine Sciences Graduate Students. This course provided students with great hands-on experience and introduced the students to areas of oceanography previously beyond their knowledge levels.

To access all the data that was collected during the expedition, log on to ftp://nopp.dms.uconn.edu/ocean_course.

The graduate student class with faculty

Nighttime sampling station

 

Jimmy deMayo

Graduate Student Publications:

 

Ilia, A., & O’Donnell, J. (2018). An Assessment of Two Models of Wave Propagation in an Estuary Protected by Breakwaters. Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, 6(4), 145. doi:10.3390/jmse6040145

 

Hedley, J.D.; Mirhakak, M.; Wentworth, A.; Dierssen, H.M. Influence of Three-Dimensional Coral Structures on Hyperspectral Benthic Reflectance and Water-Leaving Reflectance. Appl. Sci. 2018, 8, 2688.

 

Sasaki, M., Hedberg, S., Richardson, K., & Dam, H.G. (2019). Complex interactions between local adaptation, phenotypic plasticity and sex affect vulnerability to warming in a widespread marine copepod. R. Soc. open sci., 6(3). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.182115

 

Faculty Awards:

 

Sandra Shumway was awarded the FUCOBI Foundation Award for Outstanding Contributions by Women in Aquaculture, the APEX Award for Publishing Excellence (Journal of Shellfish Research) and the Association Trends Gold Award (Journal of Shellfish Research).

 

Senjie Lin (PI) and Huan Zhang (Co-PI) received a two-year grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop a CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technique for studying dinoflagellate gene functions. Titled “Moving from transformation to CRISPR/Cas9 gene knockout for dinoflagellates.”

 

Michael Whitney, has been awarded a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Iceland, set to start in 2020.

 

 

Samantha Siedlecki was awarded a NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) fellowship.

Highlights: https://today.uconn.edu/school-stories/marine-knowledge-is-power/#

 

 

Student Awards:

 

Jo-Marie Kasinak was awarded the Torrey Botanical Society’s Greller Graduate Student Research Award for the Conservation of Local Flora and Ecosystems.

 

Incoming graduate student, Monica Garity was awarded a Harriott Fellowship through the UConn Graduate School.

 

Amin Ilia, Matt Sasaki, and Brittany Sprecher received awards from the William A. Lund, Jr. Fellowship in Marine Sciences and the Andrew J. Nalwalk Memorial Award.

 

Tyler Griffin, Yipeng He, Amin Ilia, Molly James, Ewaldo Leitao, Michael Mathuri, Patricia Myer, Sean Ryan, Matt Sasaki, Emma Shipley, Sue Smith, and Mengyang Zhou received UConn Graduate School predoctoral fellowship awards through the department of Marine Sciences.

 

Graduate students Halle Berger, Sean Ryan, and Lingjie Zhou received awards from the John Rankin Scholarship Fund, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.