The National Ocean Science Bowl Finals were held in Morehead City, NC with many local marine scientists and marine laboratories facilitating the event. (ZIJ served as a science judge for some of the competition.) The finals had the theme,“Our Changing Ocean: Science for Strong Coastal Communities.” The National Ocean Sciences […]
Yearly Archives: 2016
17 posts
There is a growing recognition of marine microenvironments’ roles as reservoirs of biodiversity, sites of enhanced biological activity and in facilitating biological interactions. Here, we examine the bacterial community inhabiting free-living and particle-associated seawater microenvironments at the Pivers Island Coastal Observatory (PICO). 16S rRNA gene libraries from monthly samples (July […]
Foraging theory predicts the evolution of feeding behaviors that increase consumer fitness. Sponges were among the earliest metazoans on earth and developed a unique filter-feeding mechanism that does not rely on a nervous system. Once thought indiscriminate, sponges are now known to selectively consume picoplankton, but it is unclear whether […]
Diel regulation of hydrogen peroxide defenses by open ocean microbial communities Hydrogen peroxide (HOOH) is omnipresent in natural waters. Given that sunlight is the primary source of HOOH, we investigated the relationship between time of day and microbial HOOH degradation. Genes encoding HOOH-degrading enzymes were significantly more abundant during the […]
Lots of good stuff at the TOS/ALSO/AGU Ocean Sciences Meeting in New Orleans this year! ZIJ presented in the “Linking ‘Omics Insights to Marine Microbial Ecology and Biogeochemical Functioning” session with the following abstract: The effect of temperature on carbon uptake and its fate in diverse strains of Prochlorococcus The […]
The distribution of major clades of Prochlorococcus tracks light, temperature and other environmental variables; yet, the drivers of genomic diversity within these ecotypes and the net effect on biodiversity of the larger community are poorly understood. We examined high light (HL) adapted Prochlorococcus communities across spatial and temporal environmental gradients […]
This work contributes new knowledge about the distributions of the marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus. Specifically, it is the first to compare basin-scale latitudinal transects for the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans; it is the first to show that the ratios of the dominant lineages (ecotypes) vary as a log-linear function with temperature; […]