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  • richardmitnick 11:11 am on May 29, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "The Trillion-Dollar Auction to Save the World", A tiny fraction of the ocean floor—the 0.5 percent stores more than half of the carbon found in ocean sediments., Another seagrass biomass growing off the coast of Western Australia is the world’s largest plant., , , , , Chami fell into conversation with his hosts who told him the unhappy tale of the seas. The ocean they explained has been left to fend for itself., Chami’s hosts sent him scientific papers from which he learned about the whale’s role in the carbon cycle. She stored as much as 33 tons of carbon in her prodigious body., Chami’s numbers never failed to elicit a reaction good or bad. He was interviewed widely and asked to value plants and animals all over the world. He gave a TED Talk., , , , Every wild organism is touched by the carbon cycle and could therefore be protected with a price tag., , In a world economy striving to be greener the ability to offset greenhouse-gas emissions had a clearly defined value., It seemed to Chami that by saying a blue whale must remain priceless his detractors were ensuring that it would remain worthless., Lot 475: Adult blue whale female- What is the right price for this masterwork of biology?, Marine Biology, Massive networks of rhizomes buried beneath a few inches of sediment are the key to the seagrasses’ survival., More than a third of fisheries are overexploited. Three-quarters of coral reefs are under threat of collapse., , One patch of Mediterranean seagrass is a contender to be the world’s oldest organism having cloned itself continuously for up to 200000 years., Ralph Chami has a suggested starting bid for Lot 475. He performed the appraisal six years ago after what amounted to a religious experience on the deck of a research vessel in the Gulf of California., Scientists had recently mapped what was believed to be 40 percent of the world’s seagrass all in one place: the Bahamas., Seagrass has a long history of being ignored. Though it grows in tufted carpets off the coast of every continent but Antartica it is a background character rarely drawing human attention., Seagrass- a humble ocean plant worth trillions, Seagrasses are receding at an average of 1.5 percent per year killed off by marine heat waves and pollution and development., Seagrasses are the only flowering plants on Earth that spend their entire lives underwater. They rely on ocean currents and animals to spread their seeds ., Seagrasses not only put down roots in the seabed but also grow horizontal rhizomes through it lashing themselves together into vast living networks., The ocean water is warming and acidifying., The whale’s value to humanity on the basis of the emissions she helped sequester over her 60-year lifetime was $2 million.,   

    From “WIRED” : “The Trillion-Dollar Auction to Save the World” 

    From “WIRED”
    5.25.23
    Gregory Barber
    ILLUSTRATIONS: ISRAEL G. VARGAS

    1

    Seagrass- a humble ocean plant worth trillions

    Ocean creatures soak up huge amounts of humanity’s carbon mess. Should we value them like financial assets?

    You are seated in an auction room at Christie’s, where all evening you have watched people in suits put prices on priceless wonders. A parade of Dutch oils and Ming vases has gone to financiers and shipping magnates and oil funds. You have made a few unsuccessful bids, but the market is obscene, and you are getting bored. You consider calling it an early night and setting down the paddle. But then an item appears that causes you to tighten your grip. Lot 475: Adult blue whale, female.

    What is the right price for this masterwork of biology? Unlike a Ming vase, Lot 475 has never been appraised. It’s safe to say that she is worth more than the 300,000 pounds of meat, bone, baleen, and blubber she’s made of. But where does her premium come from? She has biological value, surely—a big fish supports the littler ones—but you wouldn’t know how to quantify it. The same goes for her cultural value, the reverence and awe she elicits in people: immeasurable. You might conclude that this exercise is futile. Lot 475 is priceless. You brace for the bidding war, fearful of what the people in suits might do with their acquisition. But no paddles go up.

    Ralph Chami has a suggested starting bid for Lot 475. He performed the appraisal six years ago, after what amounted to a religious experience on the deck of a research vessel in the Gulf of California. One morning, a blue whale surfaced so close to the ship that Chami could feel its misty breath on his cheeks. “I was like, ‘Where have you been all my life?’” he recalls. “‘Where have I been all my life?’”

    Chami was 50 at the time, taking a break from his job at the International Monetary Fund, where he had spent the better part of a decade steadying markets in fragile places such as Libya and Sudan. “You become fragile yourself,” he says. When he saw the whale, he sensed her intelligence. He thought: “She has a life. She has a family. She has a history.” The moment brought him to tears, which he hid from the others on board.

    That evening, Chami fell into conversation with his hosts, who told him the unhappy tale of the seas. The ocean, they explained, has been left to fend for itself. Trapped between borders, largely out of reach of law and order, its abundance is eroding at an alarming rate. The water is warming and acidifying. More than a third of fisheries are overexploited, and three-quarters of coral reefs are under threat of collapse. As for whales, people might love them, might pass laws to ban their slaughter and protect their mating grounds, but people also love all the things that threaten whales most—oil drilled from offshore platforms that pollute their habitat, goods carried by cargo ships that collide with them, pinging sonar signals that disrupt their songs.

    Chami had always loved the water. Growing up in Lebanon, he toyed with the idea of becoming an oceanographer before his father told him “in your dreams.” As he heard the researchers’ story, something awakened in him. He sensed that the same tools he had used to repair broken economies might help restore the oceans. Were they not a crisis zone too?

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    Chami’s hosts sent him scientific papers, from which he learned about the whale’s role in the carbon cycle. She stored as much as 33 tons of carbon in her prodigious body, he calculated, and fertilized the ocean with her iron-rich poop, providing fuel to trillions of carbon-dismantling phytoplankton. This piqued Chami’s interest. In a world economy striving to be greener, the ability to offset greenhouse-gas emissions had a clearly defined value. It was measured in carbon credits, representing tons of carbon removed from the atmosphere. While the whale herself couldn’t—shouldn’t—be bought and sold, the premium generated by her ecological role could. She was less like an old painting, in other words, than an old-growth forest.

    So what was the whale worth in carbon? It appeared no one had done the calculation. Chami loaded up his actuarial software and started crunching the numbers over and over, until he could say with confidence that the whale would pay dividends with every breath she took and every calf she bore. He concluded that the whale’s value to humanity, on the basis of the emissions she helped sequester over her 60-year lifetime, was $2 million. A starting bid.

    For Chami, this number represented more than a burned-out economist’s thought experiment. It would allow for a kind of capitalistic alchemy: By putting a price on the whale’s services, he believed he could transform her from a liability—a charity case for a few guilt-ridden philanthropists—into an asset. The money the whale raised in carbon credits would go to conservationists or to the governments in whose waters she swam. They, in turn, could fund efforts that would ensure the whale and her kin kept right on sequestering CO2. Any new threat to the whale’s environment—a shipping lane, a deepwater rig—would be seen as a threat to her economic productivity. Even people who didn’t really care about her would be forced to account for her well-being.

    2
    Before he went into finance, Ralph Chami toyed with the idea of becoming an oceanographer.

    It was a “win-win-win,” Chami believed: Carbon emitters would get help meeting their obligations to avert global collapse; conservationists would get much-needed funds; and the whale would swim blissfully on, protected by the invisible hand of the market.

    What’s more, Chami realized, every wild organism is touched by the carbon cycle and could therefore be protected with a price tag. A forest elephant, for example, fertilizes soil and clears underbrush, allowing trees to thrive. He calculated the value of those services at $1.75 million, far more than the elephant was worth as a captive tourist attraction or a poached pair of tusks. “Same thing for the rhinos, and same thing for the apes,” Chami says. “What would it be if they could speak and say, ‘Hey, pay me, man?’”

    Chami’s numbers never failed to elicit a reaction, good or bad. He was interviewed widely and asked to value plants and animals all over the world. He gave a TED Talk. Some people accused him of cheapening nature, debasing it by affixing a price tag. Cetacean experts pointed to vast gaps in their understanding of how, exactly, whales sequester carbon. But it seemed to Chami that by saying a blue whale must remain priceless, his detractors were ensuring that it would remain worthless.

    In 2020, Chami was invited to participate in a task force about nature-based solutions to climate change whose participants included Carlos Duarte, a Spanish marine biologist at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. Duarte was widely known in conservation circles as the father of “blue carbon,” a field of climate science that emphasizes the role of the oceans in cleaning up humanity’s mess. In 2009, he had coauthored a United Nations report that publicized two key findings. First, the majority of anthropogenic carbon emissions are absorbed into the sea. Second, a tiny fraction of the ocean floor—the 0.5 percent that’s home to most of the planet’s mangrove forests, salt marshes, and seagrass meadows—stores more than half of the carbon found in ocean sediments.

    After the task force, the two men got to talking. Duarte told Chami that scientists had recently mapped what he believed to be 40 percent of the world’s seagrass, all in one place: the Bahamas. The plant was a sequestration power house, Duarte explained. And around the world, it was under threat. Seagrasses are receding at an average of 1.5 percent per year, killed off by marine heat waves, pollution, development.

    Chami was intrigued. Then he did a rough estimate for the worth of all the carbon sequestered by seagrass around the world, and he got more excited. It put every other number to shame. The value, he calculated, was $1 trillion.

    3

    Seagrass has a long history of being ignored. Though it grows in tufted carpets off the coast of every continent but Antartica, it is a background character, rarely drawing human attention except when it clings to an anchor line or fouls up a propeller or mars the aesthetics of a resort beach. Divers don’t visit a seagrass meadow to bask in its undulating blades of green. They come to see the more charismatic creatures that spend time there, like turtles and sharks. If the seagrass recedes in any particular cove or inlet from one decade to the next, few people would be expected to notice.

    When Duarte began studying seagrasses in the 1980s, “not even the NGOs cared” about what was going on in the meadows, he recalls. But he had a unique perspective on unloved environments, having tramped around bogs and swamps since graduate school and gone on dives in the submerged meadows off Majorca. The more he studied the plants, the more he understood how valuable they could be in the fight against climate change.

    Seagrasses are the only flowering plants on Earth that spend their entire lives underwater. They rely on ocean currents and animals to spread their seeds (which are, by the way, pretty tasty). Unlike seaweeds, seagrasses not only put down roots in the seabed but also grow horizontal rhizomes through it, lashing themselves together into vast living networks. One patch of Mediterranean seagrass is a contender to be the world’s oldest organism, having cloned itself continuously for up to 200,000 years. Another growing off the coast of Western Australia is the world’s largest plant.

    Those massive networks of rhizomes, buried beneath a few inches of sediment, are the key to the seagrasses’ survival. They’re also how the plants are able to put away carbon so quickly—as much as 10 times as fast, Duarte eventually calculated, as a mature tropical rainforest. And yet, no one could be convinced to care. “I nicknamed seagrass the ugly duckling of conservation,” he told me.

    Then one day in 2020, Duarte connected with a marine biologist named Austin Gallagher, the head of an American NGO called “Beneath the Waves”. Gallagher was a shark guy, and the seagrass was largely a backdrop to his work. But his team of volunteers and scientists had spent years studying tiger sharks with satellite tags and GoPro cameras, and they had noticed something in the creatures’ great solo arcs around the Bahamas: The sharks went wherever they could find sea turtles to eat, and wherever the sea turtles went, there were meadows of seagrass. From the glimpses the team was getting on camera, there was a lot of it.

    Gallagher knew about Duarte’s work on seagrass carbon through his wife, a fellow marine scientist. Together, the two men came up with a plan to map the Bahamian seagrass by fitting sharks with 360-degree cameras. Once they verified the extent of the meadows, Chami would help them value the carbon and organize a sale of credits with the Bahamian government. The project would be unique in the world. While some groups have sought carbon credits for replanting degraded seagrass meadows—a painstaking process that is expensive, uncertain, and generally limited in scale—this would be the first attempt to claim credits for conserving an existing ecosystem. The scale would dwarf all other ocean-based carbon efforts.

    The government was eager to listen. The Bahamas, like other small island nations, is under threat from sea-level rise and worsening natural disasters—problems largely caused by the historical carbon emissions of large industrialized nations. In 2019, Hurricane Dorian swept through the islands, causing more than $3 billion in damage and killing at least 74 people; more than 200 are still listed as missing. For the government, the idea of global carbon emitters redirecting some of their enormous wealth into the local economy was only logical. “We have been collecting the garbage out of the air,” Prime Minister Philip Davis said to a summit audience last year, “but we have not been paid for it.”

    The government formalized its carbon credit market last spring, in legislation that envisions the Bahamas as an international trading hub for blue carbon. Carbon Management Limited, a partnership between Beneath the Waves and local financiers, will handle everything from the carbon science to monetization. (The partnership, which is co-owned by the Bahamian government, will collect 15 percent of revenue.) The plans at first intersected with the booming crypto scene in the Bahamas, involving talks to have the cryptocurrency exchange FTX set up a service for trading carbon credits. But after FTX collapsed and its CEO was extradited to face charges in the US, the organizers changed tack. They project that the Bahamian seagrass could generate credits for between 14 and 18 million metric tons of carbon each year, translating to between $500 million and more than $1 billion in revenue. Over 30 years, the meadows could bring in tens of billions of dollars. Far from being an ugly duckling, the seagrass would be a golden goose.

    4
    Seagrass is the “ugly duckling of conservation,” Carlos Duarte says. He calculated that the plant may put away carbon at 10 times the rate of a mature rainforest.

    Duarte sees the project in the Bahamas as a blueprint (pun intended, he says) for a much grander idea that has animated his work for the past two decades: He wants to restore all aquatic habitats and creatures to their preindustrial bounty. He speaks in terms of “blue natural capital,” imagining a future in which the value of nature is priced into how nations calculate their economic productivity.

    This is different from past efforts to financialize nature, he emphasizes. Since the 19th century, conservationists have argued that protecting bison or lions or forests is a sound investment because extinct animals and razed trees can no longer provide trophies or timber. More recently, ecologists have tried to demonstrate that less popular habitats, such as wetlands, can serve humanity better as flood protectors or water purifiers than as sites for strip malls. But while these efforts may appeal to hunters or conservationists, they are far from recasting nature as a “global portfolio of assets,” as a Cambridge economist described natural capital in a 2021 report commissioned by the UK government.

    Duarte and I first met in the halls of a crowded expo at the 2022 UN Climate Conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. He had traveled a short distance from his home in Jeddah, where he oversees a wide array of projects, from restoring corals and advising on regenerative tourism projects along Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast to a global effort to scale up seaweed farming (using, yes, revenue from carbon credits). In Egypt, Duarte was scheduled to appear on 22 panels, serving as the scientific face of the kingdom’s plan for a so-called circular carbon economy, in which carbon is treated as a commodity to be managed more responsibly, often with the help of nature.

    Chami was there too, wearing a trim suit and a pendant in the shape of a whale’s tail around his neck. He was participating as a member of the Bahamian delegation, which included Prime Minister Davis and various conservationists from Beneath the Waves. They had arrived with a pitch for how to include biodiversity in global discussions about climate change. The seagrass was their template, one that could be replicated across the world, ideally with the Bahamas as a hub for natural markets.

    The UN meeting was a good place to spread the gospel of seagrass. The theme of the conference was how to get wealthy polluters to pay for the damage they cause in poorer nations that experience disasters such as Hurricane Dorian. The hope was to eventually hammer out a UN agreement, but in the meantime, other approaches for moving money around were in the ether. Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries had been forced to start accounting for carbon emissions in their balance sheets. Big emitters were lining up deals with cash-poor, biodiversity-rich nations to make investments in nature that would potentially help the polluters hit their climate commitments. Chami’s boss at the IMF had suggested that nations in debt could start to think about using their natural assets, valued in carbon, to pay it off. “All of these poor countries today are going to find out that they’re very, very rich,” Chami told me.

    At a conference where the main message often seemed to be doom, the project in the Bahamas was a story of hope, Chami said. When he gave a talk about the seagrass, he spoke with the vigor of a tent revivalist. With the time humanity had left to fix the climate, he told the audience, “cute projects” weren’t going to cut it anymore. A few million dollars for seagrass replanting here, a handful of carbon credits for protecting a stand of mangroves there—no, people needed to be thinking a thousand times bigger. Chami wanted to know what everyone gathered in Egypt was waiting for. “Why are we dilly-dallying?” he asked the crowd. “So much talk. So little action.”

    One day this past winter, a former real estate developer from Chattanooga, Tennessee, named David Harris piloted his personal jet over the Little Bahama Bank. From his cockpit window, the water below looked like the palette of a melancholic painter. Harris was bound for a weed-cracked landing strip in West End, Grand Bahama, where he would board a fishing boat called the Tigress. Harris and his crew—which included his 10-year-old daughter—would spend the rest of the week surveying seagrass meadows for Beneath the Waves.

    They were tackling a great expanse. While the total land area of the Bahamas is a mere 4,000 square miles, the islands are surrounded by shallow undersea platforms roughly 10 times that size. These banks are the work of corals, which build towering carbonate civilizations that pile atop one another like the empires of Rome. When the first seagrasses arrived here about 30 million years ago, they found a perfect landscape. The plants do best in the shallows, closest to the light.

    Harris, who speaks with a warm twang and has the encouraging air of a youth baseball coach, had been traveling to the Bahamas for years in pursuit of dives, fish, and the occasional real estate deal. He met Gallagher on a fishing trip and soon began helping with his tiger shark advocacy. That work was an exciting mix of scientific research—including dives alongside the notoriously aggressive animals—and playing host to crews for Shark Week TV programs and their celebrity guests. Eventually, Harris sold his company, retired, and threw himself into volunteering full-time.

    He had not expected to spend his days looking at seagrass. But here he was, leading a blue carbon expedition. With help from Duarte, Beneath the Waves had created its shark-enabled seagrass map. The group pulled in a Swedish firm to scan the region using lidar cameras affixed to a small plane, allowing them to peer through the water and, using machine learning, infer from the pixels how dense the meadows were.

    Now Harris and his crew were validating the aerial data, a painstaking process that required filming dozens of hours of footage of the seafloor and taking hundreds of sediment cores. The footage was meant to verify the lidar-based predictions that separated the seagrasses from beds of empty sand and algae. The cores would be sent to a lab in a prep school outside Boston, Gallagher’s alma mater, where they would be tested for their organic carbon content. When all the data was combined, it would reveal how much carbon the meadows contained.

    The Tigress was set to autopilot along a straight line, hauling GoPro cameras off the starboard side. From this vantage, the scale of the task was easy to appreciate. At a lazy 5 knots, each line took about an hour. This patch of sea—one of 30 that Beneath the Waves planned to survey around the banks—would require about 20 lines to cover. Harris’s daughter counted sea stars and sketched them in a journal to justify a few days off from school. Her father surveyed the banks in hopeful search of a shark. At the end of each line, the crew retrieved the cameras, dripping with strands of sargassum, and swapped out the memory cards.

    Harris’ crew would eventually present their protocol for assessing the carbon storage potential of seagrass to Verra, a nonprofit carbon registry. Verra develops standards to ensure there’s real value there before the credits are sold. To meet the organization’s requirements, Beneath the Waves must prove two things: first, that the seagrass is actually sequestering carbon at the rates it estimates; second, that the meadows would put away more carbon if they were protected. No one is going to pay to protect a carbon sink that would do fine on its own, the thinking goes. A billion-dollar opportunity requires a commensurate threat.

    Harris told me that Beneath the Waves was still in “the exploratory phase” when it came to quantifying threats. They had various ideas—mining near shore, illegal trawl fishing, anchoring, water quality issues. As far as the carbon calculations went, though, Harris and his team felt confident in their approach. Prior to the outing on the Tigress, Beneath the Waves had already set up a for-profit company to bring its tools and methods to other blue carbon projects. It was in talks with government officials from across the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. (Gallagher told me the company would pass the profits back to the nonprofit to continue its advocacy and research.)

    Meanwhile, the head of Carbon Management, the scientific and financial partnership behind the project, told me he was pitching the investment to his clients, mostly “high-net-worth individuals” looking to diversify their portfolios while fighting climate change. Oil companies and commodities traders are interested too, he told me, as well as cruise lines and hotels that do business in the Bahamas. The Bahamian government has not yet said how it will allocate the money from the seagrass project. Hurricane recovery and preparedness could be on the list, as could seagrass conservation.

    The Tigress crew worked until the light began to fade, then headed back to port. Harris said he was happy to be doing his part out on the water. All that money would be a good thing for the Bahamas, he thought, especially as the country planned for a future of bigger storms. In the days after Hurricane Dorian, which hit Grand Bahama with 185-mph winds and heaved the shallow waters of the Banks over the land, Harris had flown to the island to help a friend who had survived by clinging to a tree along with his children. The storm’s legacy is still apparent in ways small and large. At a restaurant near the Tigress’ berth, there was no fresh bread—“not since Dorian,” when the ovens were flooded, the waitress told me with a laugh. Then she stopped laughing. The recovery had been slow. The young people and tourists had not come back. The airport had not been repaired. She wondered where her tax dollars were going.

    That night, over dinner in the ovenless restaurant, Harris showed me a photo of his vintage Chevy Blazer. He said he hoped the seagrass project would generate enough carbon carbon credits to offset the old gas-guzzler. This was a joke, obviously, but it expressed a deeper wish. The promise of carbon credits is that, wielded in their most ideal form, they will quietly subtract the emissions humans keep adding to the atmospheric bill. Every stroke of a piston, every turn of a jet engine, every cattle ranch and petrochemical plant—every addiction that people can’t give up, or won’t, or haven’t had a chance to yet—could be zeroed out.

    5

    For governments, assigning nature a concrete value could take many forms. They could encourage the development of sustainable ecotourism and aquaculture, where the value of the ecosystem is in the revenue it creates. Or they could confer legal rights on nature, effectively giving ecosystems the right to sue for damages—and incentivizing polluters to not damage them. But in Duarte’s 30 years of advocating for creatures and plants like seagrasses, politics have gotten in the way of biodiversity protections. Only carbon trading has “made nature investable,” he says, at a speed and scale that could make a difference.

    That is not to say he loves the system. Carbon credits arose from a “failure to control greed,” Duarte says. Beyond that, they are not designed for the protection of nature; rather, they use it as a means to an end. Any plant or creature that packs away carbon, like a tree or a seagrass meadow—and perhaps an elephant or a whale—is a tool for hitting climate goals. It’s worth something. Any creature that doesn’t, including those that Duarte loves, like coral reefs, is on its own.

    Duarte also worries about “carbon cowboys” trying to make a buck through sequestration projects that have no real scientific basis or end up privatizing what should be public natural resources. Even projects that seem to adhere closely to the market’s rules may fall apart with closer scrutiny. Earlier this year, a few weeks after the Tigress sailed, The Guardian published an analysis of Verra’s methodologies that called into question 94 percent of the registry’s rainforest projects. Reporters found that some developers had obtained “phantom credits” for forest protection that ended up pushing destruction one valley over, or used improper references to measure how much deforestation their projects avoided. (Verra disputes the findings.)

    When it comes to carbon arithmetic, trees should be a relatively simple case: addition by burning fossil fuels, subtraction by photosynthesis. The forestry industry has honed tools that can measure the carbon stored in trunks and branches. And yet the math still broke, because people took advantage of imperfect methods.

    Seagrass is also more complex than it might seem. After an initial wave of enthusiasm about its carbon-packing powers, increasing numbers of marine biologists expressed concerns when the discussion turned to carbon credits. For one thing, they argue, the fact that seagrass removes CO2 through water, rather than air, makes the sequestration value of any particular meadow difficult to appraise. In South Florida, a biogeochemist named Bryce Van Dam measured the flow of CO2 in the air above seagrass meadows. He found that in the afternoons, when photosynthesis should have been roaring and more CO2 being sucked into the plants, the water was releasing CO2 instead. This was the result, Van Dam suggested, of seagrass and other creatures that live in the meadows altering the chemistry of the water. (Duarte contends that Van Dam’s premise was flawed.)

    Another issue is that, unlike a rainforest, which stores most of its carbon in its trunks and canopies, a seagrass meadow earns most of its keep belowground. When Sophia Johannessen, a geochemical oceanographer at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, took a look at common assessments of carbon storage in seagrass, she concluded that many were based on samples that were far too shallow. Though this carbon was considered permanently locked away, the sediment could easily be disturbed by animals or currents. When Johannessen saw the ways that nonprofits and governments were picking up the science as though it were gospel, she was stunned. “I hadn’t known about ‘blue carbon,’ so perhaps it’s not surprising they didn’t know about sediment geochemistry,” she told me.

    Chami’s solution to these niggling scientific uncertainties is to focus instead on the global picture: Earth’s seagrass meadows sit atop vast stores of carbon, and destruction has the potential to visit all of them. He likens natural capital to the mortgage market. When a prospective homeowner gets a loan from a bank, the bank then sells the loan, which is swapped and bundled with other loans. Each loan contains unique risks, but the bundled asset controls for that uncertainty. Financiers have no problem with uncertainty, Chami notes; it is the locus of profit. The money they invest gets poured back into the mortgage market, allowing banks to issue more loans. The characteristics of the individual homes and borrowers don’t matter that much. “You can’t scale up when every case is a unique case,” he says. “You need to homogenize the product in order to make a market.” Scale is the bulwark against destruction. One seagrass meadow can be ignored; a seagrass market, which encompasses many meadows and represents a major investment, cannot.

    When each ecosystem is treated the same—based on how much carbon it has socked away—the issue of quantifying threats becomes simpler. Chami cites the example of Gabon, which last year announced the sale of 90 million carbon credits based on recent rainforest protections. Skeptics have pointed out that nobody has plans to fell the trees. The government has replied that if it can’t find a buyer for the credits, that may change. In the Bahamas, Prime Minister Davis has invoked a similar idea. Seagrass protection, he has said, could be reframed as a payment to prevent oil companies from drilling in the banks for the next 30 years. Seen one way, these are not-so-veiled threats. Seen another, they reveal a fundamental unfairness in the carbon markets: Why can’t those who are already good stewards of nature’s carbon sinks get their credits, too?

    The numerous seagrass scientists I spoke with expressed a common wish that Chami’s simplified carbon math could be true. Seagrass desperately requires protection. But instead they kept coming back to the uncertainty. Van Dam compares the standard methods for assessing seagrass carbon to judging a business based only on its revenue. To understand the full picture, you also need a full accounting of the money flowing out. You need to trouble yourself with all of the details. This is why the rush to monetize the meadows—and offer justification for additional carbon emissions—worried him. “Now that there’s money attached to it,” he told me, “there’s little incentive for people to say ‘stop.’”

    A few months after the Tigress outing, members of the Bahamian conservation community received invitations to a meeting in Nassau. The invitees included scientists from the local chapter of the Nature Conservancy and the Bahamas National Trust, a nonprofit that oversees the country’s 32 national parks, as well as smaller groups. Gallagher kicked off the meeting with a review of what Beneath the Waves had achieved with its mapping effort. Then he came to the problem: He needed data about what might be killing Bahamian seagrass.

    This problem wasn’t trivial. The government’s blue carbon legislation required that the project adhere to standards like Verra’s, which meant figuring out how conservation efforts would increase the amount of carbon stored. Beneath the Waves was drawing a meticulous map of the seagrass and its carbon as they exist today, but the group didn’t have a meticulous map from five years ago, or 30 years ago, that would show whether the meadows were growing or shrinking and whether humans were the cause.

    Gallagher told me he is confident that the multibillion-dollar valuation of the seagrass reflects conservative assumptions. But the plan itself is in the hands of the Bahamian government, he said. Officials have not spoken much about this part of the process, despite early excitement about eye-popping valuations and rapid timelines for generating revenue. (Government officials declined multiple interview requests, referring WIRED back to Beneath the Waves, and did not respond to additional questions.)

    Some of the local conservation groups had received the meeting invitation with surprise. Among many Bahamians I spoke with, frustration had been simmering since Beneath the Waves first proclaimed its seagrass “discovery,” which it described as a “lost ecosystem that was hiding in plain sight.” Many locals found this language laughable, if not insulting. Fishers knew the seagrass intimately. Conservationists had mapped swaths of it and drawn up protection plans. “You’ve had a lot of white, foreign researchers come in and say this is good for the Bahamas without having a dialog,” Marjahn Finlayson, a Bahamian climate scientist, told me. (Gallagher said that as a well-resourced group that had brought the seagrass findings to the government, it only made sense that they would be chosen to do the work.)

    6

    It was not clear that any of the groups could offer what Beneath the Waves needed. For one thing, most locals believe the seagrass to be in relatively good condition. There are threats, surely, and interventions to be done, but as Nick Higgs, a Bahamian marine biologist, told me, they likely vary with the immense diversity of the country’s 3,100 islands, rocks, and cays. Higgs gave the example of lobster fisheries—an industry that many people mentioned to me as among the more potentially significant threats to seagrass. His own research found little impact in the areas he studied. But if the fisheries are harming seagrass elsewhere, who will decide their fate from one community to the next? Protecting seagrass is a noble goal, Adelle Thomas, a climate scientist at the University of the Bahamas, told me. The question for Bahamians, she said, is “Do we have the capacity to maintain these things that we’re claiming to protect?” Money alone won’t solve the seagrass’s problems, whatever they might turn out to be.

    The creature at the heart of this debate appears to be in a sort of limbo. The prospect of a price has showered attention on seagrass, putting it in the mouths of prime ministers and sparking an overdue discussion about its well-being. Perhaps, if you ask Chami, it has helped people value the plant in other ways too—for how it breaks the force of storms hitting the islands, for the habitat it provides other animals, maybe even for its intrinsic right to go on growing for another 30 million years.

    But can the math of the carbon market get it there? On one side of the equation, where carbon is added to the atmosphere, the numbers couldn’t be clearer: They’re tabulated in barrels and odometers and frequent flier accounts. On the other side, where carbon is subtracted, there is uncertainty. Uncertainty about how carbon moves through a seagrass meadow, or a whale, or an elephant, and how money moves to protect those species. What happens when the equation doesn’t balance? More carbon, more heat, more Hurricane Dorians. A gift to polluters. As Finlayson put it, “You’re taking something from us, throwing a couple dollars at it, and then you’re still putting us at risk.”

    Chami has faith that the math will balance out in the end. He wants people to care about nature intrinsically, of course. But caring needs a catalyst. And for now, that catalyst is our addiction to carbon. “I’m conning, I’m bribing, I’m seducing the current generation to leave nature alone,” he told me. Perhaps then, he said, the next generation will grow up to value nature for itself.

    This story was reported with support from the University of California-Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship.

    Source imagery courtesy of Cristina Mittermeier, Guimoar Duarte (Portrait), Ralph Chami (Portrait), Drew McDougall, Wilson Hayes, Beneath the Waves, Getty Images, and Alamy.

    See the full article here .

    Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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  • richardmitnick 4:50 pm on May 18, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "Can Sound Help Save Coral Reefs?", , Coral reefs are more than just a feast for the eyes. They are also awash in a stunning array of sounds., , For more than a decade we've been listening to reefs in the U.S. Virgin Islands and we've been using that sound to assess the health of the reef., Marine Biology, , ,   

    From The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: “Can Sound Help Save Coral Reefs?” 

    From The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

    5.18.23
    Véronique LaCapra

    1
    Can sound science help the reefs? https://saveourseasmagazine.com

    Coral reefs are more than just a feast for the eyes, they are also awash in a stunning array of sounds. The chirps, grunts, and snaps of fish, shrimp, and other reef inhabitants are hallmarks of a healthy coral community rich in animals moving, feeding, calling out to potential mates, and fending off predators. To free-floating coral larvae—each no bigger than a grain of sand—this biological symphony serves as a siren’s song, drawing them to healthy reefs to settle, attach, and grow.

    “For more than a decade, we’ve been listening to reefs in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and we’ve been using that sound to assess the health of the reef,” says WHOI acoustic biologist Aran Mooney. A healthy reef, Mooney says, has a lush, complex soundscape; a damaged one, on the other hand, sounds as degraded as it looks—and coral larvae drifting in the water above can hear the difference.

    In earlier studies, Mooney found that larvae placed in acoustically transparent cups—but isolated from all other environmental cues—were much more likely to settle onto the reef and grow when the cups were placed on a vibrant, noisy reef than on a degraded one lacking a complex soundscape.

    Although that seems like bad news for damaged reefs, coral larvae’s attraction to healthy reef sounds could in fact prove to be a powerful tool in reef restoration efforts.

    “By recording the sounds of a healthy reef and playing them back to coral larvae, maybe we can get them to settle somewhere they normally wouldn’t—on a damaged reef in need of restoration,” Mooney says.

    2
    A speaker is installed on the seafloor to play the sounds of a healthy reef ecosystem in the hopes of encouraging coral larvae settlement. (Photo by Dan Mele, © Woods Hole Oceangoraphic Institution)

    To test this theory, Mooney worked with WHOI engineer Ben Weiss and others to build an underwater “acoustic enhancement system.” The initial prototype consisted of a swimming pool speaker attached to a float, equipped with batteries powered by a solar panel, and a micro-SD chip of soundscape recordings—ones that would appeal to coral larvae, which respond to sound’s vibration, not the tones that humans hear.

    Once the prototype was complete, it was time to get it in the water.

    Early in the summer of 2022, Nadège Aoki, an MIT-WHOI Joint Program student in Mooney’s lab, flew with him and others on his team to St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands to lead a series of experiments timed with the new moon—the peak window for coral spawning. For her first experiment, Aoki used the mustard hill coral Porites astreoides.

    She brought samples of the coral into the lab, allowed them to spawn in seawater tanks, then collected their larvae and put them into cups containing small, 3-D clay structures for them to settle on. She placed the cups out on three different reefs—two degraded, one healthy—at 1, 5, 10, and 30 meters from the speaker system. At one degraded reef, the system played a healthy soundscape. At the other, the negative control, the system was turned on, but played nothing. The healthy reef—the same one where the playback soundscape had been recorded—served as a positive control. Once the cups were in place, Aoki checked for coral settlement after 24, 48, and 72 hours.

    The initial results were startling.

    “At the acoustically enhanced site, we found much more settlement—2 to 3 times more—than without enhancement,” Aoki says. In other words, the soundscape playback had worked, inducing larvae to settle at rates higher than even those at the healthy reef. That encouraging pattern held for all time intervals tested, and as expected, the effect decreased with distance from the speaker system.

    Aoki repeated a simplified version of the experiment with a second species, the golf ball coral Favia fragum, in seawater tanks and in the field. This too showed acoustic enrichment increased settlement rates, but only early-on, when the coral could afford to be picky about choosing a settlement site. A third experiment—using terracotta settlement tiles instead of larvae enclosed in cups—failed to show an effect.

    Mooney says these studies clearly show that healthy reef sounds enhance settlement. Yet the last result, he cautions, highlights the critical need to carefully select restoration locations where, and times of year when, larvae are naturally abundant.

    “These were important pilot studies. If we redo this experiment, we’ll go back in August and September and do it when there is more mass coral spawning and a lot more larvae in the water,” Mooney says.

    Another important factor, he says, is to understand the path of currents carrying larvae to and from the reef. Mooney is working with WHOI coastal physical oceanographer Gordon Zhang to develop hydrodynamic models of currents on and around coral reefs to better inform acoustic intervention efforts.

    The next step, Mooney says, will be for his team to work with organizations actively restoring reefs, such as The Nature Conservancy and local conservation groups, to test the soundscape approach with more coral species in more locations across the U.S. Virgin Islands, Hawaii, and beyond. The ultimate goal, he says, is to turn his one-off prototype into a low-cost, reproduceable acoustic system that non-experts can easily use and deploy on reefs around the globe.

    “What makes acoustic enhancement really exciting is that it can work as a stand-alone intervention or as a tool to enhance existing restoration projects and approaches,” Mooney says. “I think we’ve come up with something that can make a real, measurable impact on bringing coral reefs back to health.”

    3
    An acoustic electronics package floats on surface buoy above the reef. (Photo by Dan Mele, © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

    See the full article here .

    Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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    Mission Statement

    The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is dedicated to advancing knowledge of the ocean and its connection with the Earth system through a sustained commitment to excellence in science, engineering, and education, and to the application of this knowledge to problems facing society.

    Vision & Mission

    The ocean is a defining feature of our planet and crucial to life on Earth, yet it remains one of the planet’s last unexplored frontiers. For this reason, WHOI scientists and engineers are committed to understanding all facets of the ocean as well as its complex connections with Earth’s atmosphere, land, ice, seafloor, and life—including humanity. This is essential not only to advance knowledge about our planet, but also to ensure society’s long-term welfare and to help guide human stewardship of the environment. WHOI researchers are also dedicated to training future generations of ocean science leaders, to providing unbiased information that informs public policy and decision-making, and to expanding public awareness about the importance of the global ocean and its resources.

    The Institution is organized into six departments, the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Ocean Research, and a marine policy center. Its shore-based facilities are located in the village of Woods Hole, Massachusetts and a mile and a half away on the Quissett Campus. The bulk of the Institution’s funding comes from grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation and other government agencies, augmented by foundations and private donations.

    WHOI scientists, engineers, and students collaborate to develop theories, test ideas, build seagoing instruments, and collect data in diverse marine environments. Ships operated by WHOI carry research scientists throughout the world’s oceans. The WHOI fleet includes two large research vessels (R/V Atlantis and R/V Neil Armstrong); the coastal craft Tioga; small research craft such as the dive-operation work boat Echo; the deep-diving human-occupied submersible Alvin; the tethered, remotely operated vehicle Jason/Medea; and autonomous underwater vehicles such as the REMUS and SeaBED.


    WHOI offers graduate and post-doctoral studies in marine science. There are several fellowship and training programs, and graduate degrees are awarded through a joint program with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. WHOI is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges . WHOI also offers public outreach programs and informal education through its Exhibit Center and summer tours. The Institution has a volunteer program and a membership program, WHOI Associate.

    On October 1, 2020, Peter B. de Menocal became the institution’s eleventh president and director.

    History

    In 1927, a National Academy of Sciences committee concluded that it was time to “consider the share of the United States of America in a worldwide program of oceanographic research.” The committee’s recommendation for establishing a permanent independent research laboratory on the East Coast to “prosecute oceanography in all its branches” led to the founding in 1930 of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

    A $2.5 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation supported the summer work of a dozen scientists, construction of a laboratory building and commissioning of a research vessel, the 142-foot (43 m) ketch R/V Atlantis, whose profile still forms the Institution’s logo.

    WHOI grew substantially to support significant defense-related research during World War II, and later began a steady growth in staff, research fleet, and scientific stature. From 1950 to 1956, the director was Dr. Edward “Iceberg” Smith, an Arctic explorer, oceanographer and retired Coast Guard rear admiral.

    In 1977 the institution appointed the influential oceanographer John Steele as director, and he served until his retirement in 1989.

    On 1 September 1985, a joint French-American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution identified the location of the wreck of the RMS Titanic which sank off the coast of Newfoundland 15 April 1912.

    On 3 April 2011, within a week of resuming of the search operation for Air France Flight 447, a team led by WHOI, operating full ocean depth autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) owned by the Waitt Institute discovered, by means of sidescan sonar, a large portion of debris field from flight AF447.

    In March 2017 the institution effected an open-access policy to make its research publicly accessible online.

    The Institution has maintained a long and controversial business collaboration with the treasure hunter company Odyssey Marine. Likewise, WHOI has participated in the location of the San José galleon in Colombia for the commercial exploitation of the shipwreck by the Government of President Santos and a private company.

    In 2019, iDefense reported that China’s hackers had launched cyberattacks on dozens of academic institutions in an attempt to gain information on technology being developed for the United States Navy. Some of the targets included the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The attacks have been underway since at least April 2017.

     
  • richardmitnick 10:38 am on May 17, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "University of Maine shows water temperature impacts bacteria present on lobsters shells", A University of Maine study found that the bacteria present on lobster shells is highly dependent on water temperature and climate change may directly impact on this element of lobster’s health., , , , Living for almost a year in tanks with warmer water decreased the number of different types of bacteria on lobster shells., Marine Biology, , Populations of American lobster “Homarus americanus” have declined in southern locations along the North Atlantic coast in recent decades due to increasing ocean temperatures and disease., The health of Maine lobsters is always top of mind and is becoming even more tenuous as the climate warms and changes the dynamics of ocean ecosystems., The researchers monitored 57 adult female lobsters some which were healthy and some that exhibited epizootic shell disease., The results showed that the number of different species of bacteria and the abundance of bacteria in general were lower in warmer water.,   

    From The University of Maine: “University of Maine shows water temperature impacts bacteria present on lobsters shells” 

    From The University of Maine

    4.28.23 [Just today in social media.]
    Sam Schipani
    samantha.schipani@maine.edu

    3
    Homarus americanus. UMaine.

    The health of Maine lobsters is always top of mind, and is becoming even more tenuous as the climate warms and changes the dynamics of ocean ecosystems. A University of Maine study found that the bacteria present on lobster shells is highly dependent on water temperature, indicating that climate change may have a direct impact on this important element of lobster’s health.

    Populations of American lobster, Homarus americanus, have declined in southern locations along the North Atlantic coast in recent decades due to increasing ocean temperatures and disease. Such circumstances are progressing northward toward Maine as the climate continues to warm, so it is becoming even more pressing to pinpoint the exact causes of this decline, especially given the complexities of crustacean physiology and immunology.

    “Studying these shell bacteria can help us understand how bacteria might impact lobster health, and how the environment can affect which bacteria end up on shells at all. Even if those bacteria are just along for the ride, we hope that studies like these will help us understand the complicated relationship between animals, their environment, microbes and health,” says Sue Ishaq, lead author of the publication and UMaine assistant professor of animal and veterinary sciences.

    The researchers monitored 57 adult female lobsters, some which were healthy and some that exhibited epizootic shell disease, which causes erosion of the carapace that has been spreading up the North Atlantic coast over the last two decades. They looked at the subjects under three seasonal temperature cycles, each three months apart over the course of a year, and tracked the lobsters’ shell bacterial communities using culturing and gene sequencing. The scientists also monitored the progression of the shell-diseased lobster visually and also analyzed the antimicrobial activity of hemolymph, the fluid equivalent of blood in the crustaceans.

    The results showed that the number of different species of bacteria and the abundance of bacteria in general were lower in warmer water, but being in cooler water didn’t increase the diversity of bacteria significantly. Temperature wasn’t solely responsible for the death of diseased lobsters, and some bacteria were found on all shells regardless of health status. However, several bacteria were prevalent on healthy lobster shells but missing or less abundant on diseased shells, which could indicate that shell-disease could cause the loss of a bacteria with a symbiotic relationship to lobster health.

    “Living for almost a year in tanks with warmer water decreased the number of different types of bacteria on lobster shells, but the ones that remained grew better in the lab. We were surprised to find that the lobsters living in tanks with colder water, which was the optimal temperature for lobsters, did not bring the shell bacterial community back to the diverse level it had been when we first caught these lobsters in the ocean,” Ishaq says.

    Ishaq conducted the study with scientists from several different departments on campus, including M. Scarlett Tudor, education and outreach coordinator at the UMaine Aquaculture Research Institute (ARI); Deborah Bouchard, director of ARI; Heather Hamlin, director of the School of Marine Sciences; and Jean MacRae, associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The research team also included Sarah Turner, Ph.D. candidate in aquaculture and aquatic resources, and Grace Lee, a former Bowdoin College undergraduate who had been participating in the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program.

    “Having a team with so many different areas of expertise helped us look at this complicated problem from multiple angles, and in addition to generating useful knowledge for the Maine community we were able to include student trainees who will be the next generation of interdisciplinary researchers,” Ishaq says.

    The study is now published in iScience.
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004223006831

    Figure 4. Relative abundance of bacterial taxa which were identified as important members of the lobster shell community associated with tank temperatures that simulate three geographic locations off the coast of New England.

    Taxa that were significantly important (p < 0.05) to the community structure with respect to tank temperature were identified using a permutational random forest algorithm. Log abundance is shown in the color scale, and columns are individual lobster shell samples. Columns are paneled by geographic location and timepoint, which reflects respective seasonal temperatures simulated in the tank. Baseline: temperature of 12.5°C on average for all three systems. Winter, 4 months: average system temperatures were Northern ME = 7.5°C, Southern ME = 8.5°C, and Southern NE = 11.0°C. Time 2: average system temperatures were Northern ME = 10°C, Southern ME = 15°C, and Southern NE = 21.0°C. Model accuracy was 79%, and the top 40 of the 207 significant bacterial SVs are shown.
    3

    See the full article here.

    Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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    Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

    Stem Education Coalition

    The University of Maine is a public land-grant research university in Orono, Maine. It was established in 1865 as the land-grant college of Maine and is the flagship university of the University of Maine System. The University of Maine is one of only a few land, sea and space grant institutions in the nation. It is classified among “R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity”.

    With an enrollment of approximately 11,500 students, The University of Maine is the state’s largest college or university. The University of Maine’s athletic teams, nicknamed the Black Bears, are Maine’s only Division I athletics program. Maine’s men’s ice hockey team has won two national championships.

    The University of Maine was founded in 1862 as a function of the Morrill Act, signed by President Abraham Lincoln. Established in 1865 as the Maine State College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts, the college opened on September 21, 1868 and changed its name to the University of Maine in 1897.

    By 1871, curricula had been organized in Agriculture, Engineering, and electives. The Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station was founded as a division of the university in 1887. Gradually the university developed the Colleges of Life Sciences and Agriculture (later to include the School of Forest Resources and the School of Human Development), Engineering and Science, and Arts and Sciences. In 1912 the Maine Cooperative Extension, which offers field educational programs for both adults and youths, was initiated. The School of Education was established in 1930 and received college status in 1958. The School of Business Administration was formed in 1958 and was granted college status in 1965. Women have been admitted into all curricula since 1872. The first master’s degree was conferred in 1881; the first doctor’s degree in 1960. Since 1923 there has been a separate graduate school.

    Near the end of the 19th century, the university expanded its curriculum to place greater emphasis on liberal arts. As a result of this shift, faculty hired during the early 20th century included Caroline Colvin, chair of the history department and the nation’s first woman to head a major university department.

    In 1906, The Senior Skull Honor Society was founded to “publicly recognize, formally reward, and continually promote outstanding leadership and scholarship, and exemplary citizenship within the University of Maine community.”

    On April 16, 1925, 80 women met in Balentine Hall — faculty, alumnae, and undergraduate representatives — to plan a pledging of members to an inaugural honorary organization. This organization was called “The All Maine Women” because only those women closely connected with the University of Maine were elected as members. On April 22, 1925, the new members were inducted into the honor society.

    When the University of Maine System was incorporated, in 1968, the school was renamed by the legislature over the objections of the faculty to the University of Maine at Orono. This was changed back to the University of Maine in 1986.

     
  • richardmitnick 7:54 am on May 15, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "The Dungeness crab is losing its sense of smell putting it at risk – and climate change may be to blame", , , , Dungeness crabs are one of the most popular crabs to eat and their fishery was valued at more than US$250 million in 2019., Marine Biology, , Ocean acidification is a direct consequence of burning fossil fuels and carbon pollution., Reduced food detection could have implications for other economically important species such as Alaskan king crabs and snow crabs., The Earth’s oceans are becoming more acidic because they are absorbing increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere., The University of Toronto-Scarborough (CA)   

    From The University of Toronto-Scarborough (CA): “The Dungeness crab is losing its sense of smell putting it at risk – and climate change may be to blame” 

    1

    From The University of Toronto-Scarborough (CA)

    5.9.23
    Don Campbell

    1
    U of T Scarborough researchers found that the Dungeness crab, popular among diners, is losing its sense of smell due to ocean acidification, which may explain why its numbers are thinning (photo by San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst via Getty Images)

    A new study by researchers at the University of Toronto finds that climate change is causing a commercially significant marine crab to lose its sense of smell, which could partially explain why their populations are thinning.

    The research was done on Dungeness crabs and found that ocean acidification causes them to physically sniff less, impacts their ability to detect food odors and even decreases activity in the sensory nerves responsible for smell.

    “This is the first study to look at the physiological effects of ocean acidification on the sense of smell in crabs,” says Cosima Porteus, an assistant professor in the department of biological sciences at U of T Scarborough and co-author of the study along with post-doctoral researcher Andrea Durant.

    The Earth’s oceans are becoming more acidic because they are absorbing increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Such ocean acidification is a direct consequence of burning fossil fuels and carbon pollution – and several studies have shown it’s having an impact on the behaviour of marine wildlife.

    Dungeness crabs are an economically important species found along the Pacific coast, stretching from California to Alaska. They are one of the most popular crabs to eat and their fishery was valued at more than US$250 million in 2019.

    Like most crabs, they have poor vision, so their sense of smell is crucial in finding food, mates, suitable habitats and avoiding predators, explains Porteus. They sniff through a process known as flicking, where they flick their antennules (small antenna) through the water to detect odours. Tiny neurons responsible for smell are located inside these antennules, which send electrical signals to the brain.

    The researchers discovered two things when the crabs were exposed to ocean acidification: they were flicking less and their sensory neurons were 50 per cent less responsive to odours.

    “Crabs increase their flicking rate when they detect an odour they are interested in, but in crabs that were exposed to ocean acidification, the odour had to be 10 times more concentrated before we saw an increase in flicking,” says Porteus.

    There are a few potential reasons why ocean acidification may be impacting sense of smell in crabs. Porteus points to other research done at the University of Hull that showed ocean acidification disrupts odour molecules, which can impact how they bind to smell receptors in marine animals such as crabs.

    For this study, published in the journal Global Change Biology [below], Porteus and Durant were able to test the electrical activity in the crabs’ sensory neurons to determine they were less responsive to odours. They also discovered that they had fewer receptors and their sensory neurons were physically shrinking by as much as 25 per cent in volume.

    “These are active cells and if they aren’t detecting odours as much, they might be shrinking to conserve energy. It’s like a muscle that will shrink if you don’t use it,” Porteus says.

    Porteus says reduced food detection could have implications for other economically important species such as Alaskan king crabs and snow crabs because their sense of smell functions the same way.

    “Losing their sense of smell seems to be climate related, so this might partially explain some of the decline in their numbers,” Porteus says.

    “If crabs are having trouble finding food, it stands to reason females won’t have as much energy to produce eggs.”

    The research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Some of the analysis was performed at U of T’s Centre for the Neurobiology of Stress.

    Global Change Biology
    See the science paper for instructive material with images.

    See the full article here.

    Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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    Stem Education Coalition

    The University of Toronto-Scarborough, is one of the three campuses that make up the tri-campus system of the University of Toronto. Located in the Scarborough district, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the campus is set upon suburban parkland next to Highland Creek. It was established in 1964 as Scarborough College, a constituent college of the Faculty of Arts and Science. The college expanded following its designation as an autonomic division of the university in 1972 and gradually became an independent institution. It ranks last in area and enrollment size among the three University of Toronto campuses, the other two being the St. George campus in Downtown Toronto and the University of Toronto Mississauga.

    Academics of the campus are centered on a variety of undergraduate studies in the disciplines of management, arts and sciences, whilst also hosting limited postgraduate research programs. Its neuroscience program was the first to be offered in the nation. The campus is noted for being the university’s sole provider of cooperative education programs, as well as the Bachelor of Business Administration degree. Through affiliation with the adjacent Centennial Science and Technology Centre of Centennial College, it also offers enrollment in joint programs.

    The campus has traditionally held the annual F. B. Watts Memorial Lectures, which has hosted internationally renowned scholars since 1970. Its nuclear magnetic resonance laboratory was the first of its kind in Canada, allowing the campus to conduct influential research in the environmental sciences. The original building of the campus was internationally acclaimed for its architectural design. The Dan Lang Field, home to the baseball team of the Toronto Varsity Blues, is also situated at the campus.

    The 152-hectare (380-acre) land along the valley of the Highland Creek was purchased in 1911 by Toronto-based businessman Miller Lash, who developed the site into his summer estate with a mansion, today known as the Miller Lash House. The mansion included 17 rooms, a barn, a coach house, and three houses for his staff to dwell. Over the following years, over 100 acres of the estate was also used as farmland. Following the death of Miller Lash in 1941, the estate was acquired by E. L. McLean, an insurance broker, in 1944 for $59,000. He made new additions to the estate, including a swimming pool and change room, and a retaining wall made in stone.

    About 82 hectares (200 acres) of property was later purchased from McLean, just before his death, by the University of Toronto for about $650,000 in 1963, as part of the university’s regional expansion. The groundskeeper of the land would continue to reside in the Highland Creek valley for the next 29 years. McLean’s additions to the Miller Lash House, which would eventually become the residence of the campus’s principal, were modernized and 28 hectares (70 acres) of surrounding land north of the estate were also acquired. The University of Toronto established the Scarborough College as part of the institution’s collegiate university system and declared the campus a branch of the Faculty of Arts and Science. D. C. Williams was appointed as the principal of Scarborough College and the planned Erindale College, as well as vice-president of the university. The college’s faculty, consisting of 16 members, was also established and headquartered at the main campus in Downtown Toronto. First classes were held at Birchmount Park Collegiate Institute and Old Biology Building at the St. George campus. Designed by John Andrews, the first building of the campus began construction the following year. Due to delays in construction after a strike among workers, the Scarborough College opened in temporary classes at the main campus to 191 full-time students in 1965. The first building was completed in time for the following academic year.

    The college included a 6,000-square-foot (560 m^2) television production studio. This was for a unique video lecturing system the college was initially planned to have, that relies on the use of closed circuit television for teaching purposes. The system grabbed international media attention, and was complimented in the 1967 edition of Time. However, the video lecturing system was abandoned after it was condemned for the lack of communicability of students with instructors. In 1972, the campus was reorganized as a separately governed division of the university’s Faculty of Arts and Science, developing its own curriculum. In 1973, it became the first post-secondary institution to adopt a course credit system in Ontario and the first cooperative education program was established. The campus adopted its present official name in 2006 after being renamed University of Toronto Scarborough Campus in 1983 and University of Toronto at Scarborough in 1996. The initials UTSC comes from the former name and continue to be used by the university to distinguish the campus from University of Toronto Schools (UTS).

    The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.

    Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.

    As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.

    University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.

    Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.

    The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 560,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.

    Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.

    The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.

    The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill(CA).

    The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.

    The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.

    The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, three foreign leaders, and fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court. As of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.

    Early history

    The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.

    On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue for ever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.

    Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.

    Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.

    A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.

    World wars and post-war years

    The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.

    Since 2000

    In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.

    The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than c. $1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a $250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.

    Research

    Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of $878 million in 2010. In 2018 the University of Toronto was named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $1,147.584 million in 2017. In the same year the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $428,200 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of $63,700. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.

    The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts.Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviours in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.

    The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia; brain tumors; and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index; the infant cereal Pablum; the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery; and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988; and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia; cystic fibrosis; and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.

    The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting $1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

     
  • richardmitnick 3:59 pm on May 12, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "Chitin": the degraded particles of ancient exoskeletons, "Like ancient mariners ancestors of "Prochlorococcus" microbes rode out to sea on exoskeleton particles", For the chitin raft hypothesis to hold the gene would have to be present in ancestors of “Prochlorococcus” soon after arthropods began to colonize marine environments., Marine Biology, , Marine systems were becoming flooded with this new type of organic carbon in the form of chitin just as genes for using this carbon spread across all different types of microbes., The chitin-degrading gene appears in common ancestors of "Prochlorococcus" and "Synecococchus"., , , The microbes hitched a ride on chitin rafts which may have also provided essential nutrients., The movement of these chitin particles suddenly opened up the opportunity for microbes to really make it out to the open ocean.   

    From The Department of Earth-Atmosphere-and Planetary Sciences At The Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “Like ancient mariners ancestors of “Prochlorococcus” microbes rode out to sea on exoskeleton particles” 

    1

    From The Department of Earth-Atmosphere-and Planetary Sciences

    at

    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    5.11.23
    Jennifer Chu

    1
    TEM image of Prochlorococcus marinus with overlay green coloring. A globally significant marine cyanobacterium. Credit: Luke Thompson from Chisholm Lab and Nikki Watson from Whitehead, MIT.

    Throughout the ocean, billions upon billions of plant-like microbes make up an invisible floating forest. As they drift, the tiny organisms use sunlight to suck up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Collectively, these photosynthesizing plankton, or phytoplankton, absorb almost as much CO2 as the world’s terrestrial forests. A measurable fraction of their carbon-capturing muscle comes from Prochlorococcus — an emerald-tinged free-floater that is the most abundant phytoplankton in the oceans today.

    But Prochlorococcus didn’t always inhabit open waters. Ancestors of the microbe likely stuck closer to the coasts, where nutrients were plentiful and organisms survived in communal microbial mats on the seafloor. How then did descendants of these coastal dwellers end up as the photosynthesizing powerhouses of the open oceans today?

    MIT scientists believe that rafting was the key. In a new study they propose that ancestors of Prochlorococcus acquired an ability to latch onto “chitin” — the degraded particles of ancient exoskeletons. The microbes hitched a ride on passing flakes, using the particles as rafts to venture further out to sea. These chitin rafts may have also provided essential nutrients, fueling and sustaining the microbes along their journey.

    Thus fortified, generations of microbes may have then had the opportunity to evolve new abilities to adapt to the open ocean. Eventually, they would have evolved to a point where they could jump ship and survive as the free-floating ocean dwellers that live today.

    “If Prochlorococcus and other photosynthetic organisms had not colonized the ocean, we would be looking at a very different planet,” says Rogier Braakman, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “It was the fact they were able to attach to these chitin rafts that enabled them to establish a foothold in an entirely new and massive part of the planet’s biosphere, in a way that changed the Earth forever.”

    Braakman and his collaborators present their new “chitin raft” hypothesis, along with experiments and genetic analyses supporting the idea, in a study appearing this week in PNAS[below].

    MIT co-authors are Giovanna Capovilla, Greg Fournier, Julia Schwartzman, Xinda Lu, Alexis Yelton, Elaina Thomas, Jack Payette, Kurt Castro, Otto Cordero, and MIT Institute Professor Sallie (Penny) Chisholm, along with colleagues from multiple institutions including the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

    A strange gene

    Prochlorococcus is one of two main groups belonging to a class known as picocyanobacteria, which are the smallest photosynthesizing organisms on the planet. The other group is Synechococcus, a closely related microbe that can be found abundantly in ocean and freshwater systems. Both organisms make a living through photosynthesis.

    But it turns out that some strains of Prochlorococcus can adopt alternative lifestyles, particularly in low-lit regions where photosynthesis is difficult to maintain. These microbes are “mixotrophic,” using a mix of other carbon-capturing strategies to grow.

    Researchers in Chisholm’s lab were looking for signs of mixotrophy when they stumbled on a common gene in several modern strains of Prochlorococcus. The gene encoded the ability to break down chitin, a carbon-rich material that comes from the sloughed-off shells of arthropods, such as insects and crustaceans.

    “That was very strange,” says Capovilla, who decided to dig deeper into the finding when she joined the lab as a postdoc.

    For the new study, Capovilla carried out experiments to see whether Prochlorococcus can in fact break down chitin in a useful way. Previous work in the lab showed that the chitin-degrading gene appeared in strains of Prochlorococcus that live in low-light conditions, and in Synechococcus. The gene was missing in Prochlorococcus inhabiting more sunlit regions.

    In the lab, Capovilla introduced chitin particles into samples of low-light and high-light strains. She found that microbes containing the gene could degrade chitin, and of these, only low-light-adapted Prochlorococcus seemed to benefit from this breakdown, as they appeared to also grow faster as a result. The microbes could also stick to chitin flakes — a result that particularly interested Braakman, who studies the evolution of metabolic processes and the ways they have shaped the Earth’s ecology.

    “People always ask me: How did these microbes colonize the early ocean?” he says. “And as Gio was doing these experiments, there was this ‘aha’ moment.”

    Braakman wondered: Could this gene have been present in the ancestors of Prochlorococcus, in a way that allowed coastal microbes to attach to and feed on chitin, and ride the flakes out to sea?

    It’s all in the timing

    To test this new “chitin raft” hypothesis, the team looked to Fournier, who specializes in tracing genes across species of microbes through history. In 2019, Fournier’s lab established an evolutionary tree [BMC Evolutionary Biology (below)] for those microbes that exhibit the chitin-degrading gene. From this tree, they noticed a trend: Microbes start using chitin only after arthropods become abundant in a particular ecosystem.

    For the chitin raft hypothesis to hold, the gene would have to be present in ancestors of Prochlorococcus soon after arthropods began to colonize marine environments.

    The team looked to the fossil record and found that aquatic species of arthropods became abundant in the early Paleozoic, about half a billion years ago. According to Fournier’s evolutionary tree, that also happens to be around the time that the chitin-degrading gene appears in common ancestors of Prochlorococcus and Synecococchus.

    “The timing is quite solid,” Fournier says. “Marine systems were becoming flooded with this new type of organic carbon in the form of chitin, just as genes for using this carbon spread across all different types of microbes. And the movement of these chitin particles suddenly opened up the opportunity for microbes to really make it out to the open ocean.”

    The appearance of chitin may have been especially beneficial for microbes living in low-light conditions, such as along the coastal seafloor, where ancient picocyanobacteria are thought to have lived. To these microbes, chitin would have been a much-needed source of energy, as well as a way out of their communal, coastal niche.

    Braakman says that once out at sea, the rafting microbes were sturdy enough to develop other ocean-dwelling adaptations. Millions of years later, the organisms were then ready to “take the plunge” and evolve into the free-floating, photosynthesizing Prochlorococcus that exist today.

    “In the end, this is about ecosystems evolving together,” Braakman says. “With these chitin rafts, both arthropods and cyanobacteria were able to expand into the open ocean. Ultimately, this helped to seed the rise of modern marine ecosystems.”

    This research was supported by the Simons Foundation, the EMBO Long-Term Fellowship, and by the Human Frontier Science Program. This paper is a contribution from the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology (SCOPE).

    PNAS

    Fig. 1.
    2
    Distribution of chitin utilization genes in marine picocyanobacteria (A) Pathway for chitin degradation (dark blue) and its reactions that overlap (blue) with peptidoglycan metabolic recycling (gray). ChiA is annotated as a putative chitinase enzyme, while ChiA-like is a homolog of the substrate-binding domain of ChiA and annotated as a putative chitin-binding domain protein. The putative chitobiose transporter UgpBAE is highlighted with an asterisk (*). (B) Average frequency of occurrence of chitin utilization and peptidoglycan recycling genes estimated from both partial and complete genome sequences available in Synechococcus and the major clades of Prochlorococcus shown in the tree on the left. Average completeness of genomes in our sample is ~75% (Materials and Methods). The clade membership of the strains used in the experiments are highlighted in bold and underlined. The gray background area in the gene frequency frame highlights genes shared between the chitin utilization and peptidoglycan pathways (dark blue genes in Fig. 1A). Average size and guanine-cytosine (GC) content of genomes are reported for each clade to illustrate the genome streamlining associated with the loss of the chitin utilization pathway (C) Detailed genomic profiles of members of the LLIV clade of Prochlorococcus, which reveals putative primary chitin degraders that possess chitinase (red star) and putative secondary chitin degraders that lack chitinase. The percentage genome completeness is reported for each clade. Abbreviations: GlcNAc—N-acetyl-glucosamine, GlcNAc-6P—N-acetyl-glucosamine 6-phosphate, GlcN-6P—glucosamine 6-phosphate, F6P—fructose 6-phosphate, ahMNAc—anhydro-N-acetyl-beta-muramate, MNAc-6P—N-acetyl-muramate 6 phosphate.

    BMC Evolutionary Biology 2019

    Fig. 1
    3
    Chitinase Gene Tree. Maximum likelihood gene tree (RaxML) illustrating the relationship between fungal and bacterial taxa. Support values for within-family bipartitions were omitted for clarity, and can be accessed in Additional file 5: Figure S3 [references to science paper].

    See the full article here.

    Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.


    five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
    Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

    Stem Education Coalition

    The Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) is the place at MIT where the turbulent oceans and atmosphere, the inaccessible depths of the inner Earth, distant planets, and the origins of life all come together under one intellectual roof.

    MIT Seal

    USPS “Forever” postage stamps celebrating Innovation at MIT.


    MIT Campus

    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The institute has an urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) alongside the Charles River. The institute also encompasses a number of major off-campus facilities such as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the MIT Bates Research and Engineering Center, and the Haystack Observatory, as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Whitehead Institute .

    Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, Massachusetts Institute of Technology adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. It has since played a key role in the development of many aspects of modern science, engineering, mathematics, and technology, and is widely known for its innovation and academic strength. It is frequently regarded as one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

    As of December 2020, 97 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, and 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 80 Marshall Scholars, 3 Mitchell Scholars, 22 Schwarzman Scholars, 41 astronauts, and 16 Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force have been affiliated with The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The university also has a strong entrepreneurial culture and MIT alumni have founded or co-founded many notable companies. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU).

    Foundation and vision

    In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a “Conservatory of Art and Science”, but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, on April 10, 1861.

    Rogers, a professor from the University of Virginia , wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances. He did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that:

    “The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.”

    The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories.

    Early developments

    Two days after Massachusetts Institute of Technology was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT’s first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865. The new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes” and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts-Amherst ). In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay.

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology was informally called “Boston Tech”. The institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker. Programs in electrical, chemical, marine, and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, and the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand.

    The curriculum drifted to a vocational emphasis, with less focus on theoretical science. The fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these “Boston Tech” years, Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president (and former MIT faculty) Charles W. Eliot’s repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College’s Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding. Eventually, the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty, students, and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court effectively put an end to the merger scheme.

    In 1916, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge Bucentaur built for the occasion, to signify MIT’s move to a spacious new campus largely consisting of filled land on a one-mile-long (1.6 km) tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. The neoclassical “New Technology” campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded largely by anonymous donations from a mysterious “Mr. Smith”, starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who had invented methods of film production and processing, and founded Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million ($236.6 million in 2015 dollars) in cash and Kodak stock to MIT.

    Curricular reforms

    In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President (effectively Provost) Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios. The Compton reforms “renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering”. Unlike Ivy League schools, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) catered more to middle-class families, and depended more on tuition than on endowments or grants for its funding. The school was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1934.

    Still, as late as 1949, the Lewis Committee lamented in its report on the state of education at Massachusetts Institute of Technology that “the Institute is widely conceived as basically a vocational school”, a “partly unjustified” perception the committee sought to change. The report comprehensively reviewed the undergraduate curriculum, recommended offering a broader education, and warned against letting engineering and government-sponsored research detract from the sciences and humanities. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the MIT Sloan School of Management were formed in 1950 to compete with the powerful Schools of Science and Engineering. Previously marginalized faculties in the areas of economics, management, political science, and linguistics emerged into cohesive and assertive departments by attracting respected professors and launching competitive graduate programs. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences continued to develop under the successive terms of the more humanistically oriented presidents Howard W. Johnson and Jerome Wiesner between 1966 and 1980.

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s involvement in military science surged during World War II. In 1941, Vannevar Bush was appointed head of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development and directed funding to only a select group of universities, including MIT. Engineers and scientists from across the country gathered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)’s Radiation Laboratory, established in 1940 to assist the British military in developing microwave radar. The work done there significantly affected both the war and subsequent research in the area. Other defense projects included gyroscope-based and other complex control systems for gunsight, bombsight, and inertial navigation under Charles Stark Draper’s Instrumentation Laboratory; the development of a digital computer for flight simulations under Project Whirlwind; and high-speed and high-altitude photography under Harold Edgerton. By the end of the war, Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the nation’s largest wartime R&D contractor (attracting some criticism of Bush), employing nearly 4000 in the Radiation Laboratory alone and receiving in excess of $100 million ($1.2 billion in 2015 dollars) before 1946. Work on defense projects continued even after then. Post-war government-sponsored research at MIT included SAGE and guidance systems for ballistic missiles and Project Apollo.

    These activities affected Massachusetts Institute of Technology profoundly. A 1949 report noted the lack of “any great slackening in the pace of life at the Institute” to match the return to peacetime, remembering the “academic tranquility of the prewar years”, though acknowledging the significant contributions of military research to the increased emphasis on graduate education and rapid growth of personnel and facilities. The faculty doubled and the graduate student body quintupled during the terms of Karl Taylor Compton, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1930 and 1948; James Rhyne Killian, president from 1948 to 1957; and Julius Adams Stratton, chancellor from 1952 to 1957, whose institution-building strategies shaped the expanding university. By the 1950s, Massachusetts Institute of Technology no longer simply benefited the industries with which it had worked for three decades, and it had developed closer working relationships with new patrons, philanthropic foundations and the federal government.

    In late 1960s and early 1970s, student and faculty activists protested against the Vietnam War and Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s defense research. In this period Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam as well as guidance systems for nuclear missiles. The Union of Concerned Scientists was founded on March 4, 1969 during a meeting of faculty members and students seeking to shift the emphasis on military research toward environmental and social problems. Massachusetts Institute of Technology ultimately divested itself from the Instrumentation Laboratory and moved all classified research off-campus to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory facility in 1973 in response to the protests. The student body, faculty, and administration remained comparatively unpolarized during what was a tumultuous time for many other universities. Johnson was seen to be highly successful in leading his institution to “greater strength and unity” after these times of turmoil. However six Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( students were sentenced to prison terms at this time and some former student leaders, such as Michael Albert and George Katsiaficas, are still indignant about MIT’s role in military research and its suppression of these protests. (Richard Leacock’s film, November Actions, records some of these tumultuous events.)

    In the 1980’s, there was more controversy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology over its involvement in SDI (space weaponry) and CBW (chemical and biological warfare) research. More recently, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)’s research for the military has included work on robots, drones and ‘battle suits’.

    Recent history

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology has kept pace with and helped to advance the digital age. In addition to developing the predecessors to modern computing and networking technologies, students, staff, and faculty members at Project MAC, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the Tech Model Railroad Club wrote some of the earliest interactive computer video games like Spacewar! and created much of modern hacker slang and culture. Several major computer-related organizations have originated at MIT since the 1980 ’s: Richard Stallman’s GNU Project and the subsequent Free Software Foundation were founded in the mid-1980 ’s at the AI Lab; the MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner to promote research into novel uses of computer technology; the World Wide Web Consortium standards organization was founded at the Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee; the MIT OpenCourseWare project has made course materials for over 2,000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology classes available online free of charge since 2002; and the One Laptop per Child initiative to expand computer education and connectivity to children worldwide was launched in 2005.

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology was named a sea-grant college in 1976 to support its programs in oceanography and marine sciences and was named a space-grant college in 1989 to support its aeronautics and astronautics programs. Despite diminishing government financial support over the past quarter century, MIT launched several successful development campaigns to significantly expand the campus: new dormitories and athletics buildings on west campus; the Tang Center for Management Education; several buildings in the northeast corner of campus supporting research into biology, brain and cognitive sciences, genomics, biotechnology, and cancer research; and a number of new “backlot” buildings on Vassar Street including the Stata Center. Construction on campus in the 2000s included expansions of the Media Lab, the Sloan School’s eastern campus, and graduate residences in the northwest. In 2006, President Hockfield launched the MIT Energy Research Council to investigate the interdisciplinary challenges posed by increasing global energy consumption.

    In 2001, inspired by the open source and open access movements, Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched OpenCourseWare to make the lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, exams, and lectures from the great majority of its courses available online for no charge, though without any formal accreditation for coursework completed. While the cost of supporting and hosting the project is high, OCW expanded in 2005 to include other universities as a part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which currently includes more than 250 academic institutions with content available in at least six languages. In 2011, Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced it would offer formal certification (but not credits or degrees) to online participants completing coursework in its “MITx” program, for a modest fee. The “edX” online platform supporting MITx was initially developed in partnership with Harvard and its analogous “Harvardx” initiative. The courseware platform is open source, and other universities have already joined and added their own course content. In March 2009 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online.

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology has its own police force. Three days after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013, MIT Police patrol officer Sean Collier was fatally shot by the suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, setting off a violent manhunt that shut down the campus and much of the Boston metropolitan area for a day. One week later, Collier’s memorial service was attended by more than 10,000 people, in a ceremony hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology community with thousands of police officers from the New England region and Canada. On November 25, 2013, Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the creation of the Collier Medal, to be awarded annually to “an individual or group that embodies the character and qualities that Officer Collier exhibited as a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology community and in all aspects of his life”. The announcement further stated that “Future recipients of the award will include those whose contributions exceed the boundaries of their profession, those who have contributed to building bridges across the community, and those who consistently and selflessly perform acts of kindness”.

    In September 2017, the school announced the creation of an artificial intelligence research lab called the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. IBM will spend $240 million over the next decade, and the lab will be staffed by MIT and IBM scientists. In October 2018 MIT announced that it would open a new Schwarzman College of Computing dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, named after lead donor and The Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman. The focus of the new college is to study not just AI, but interdisciplinary AI education, and how AI can be used in fields as diverse as history and biology. The cost of buildings and new faculty for the new college is expected to be $1 billion upon completion.

    The Caltech/MIT Advanced aLIGO was designed and constructed by a team of scientists from California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and industrial contractors, and funded by the National Science Foundation.

    Caltech /MIT Advanced aLigo

    It was designed to open the field of gravitational-wave astronomy through the detection of gravitational waves predicted by general relativity. Gravitational waves were detected for the first time by the LIGO detector in 2015. For contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, two Caltech physicists, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Rainer Weiss won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017. Weiss, who is also a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, designed the laser interferometric technique, which served as the essential blueprint for the LIGO.

    The mission of Massachusetts Institute of Technology is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the twenty-first century. We seek to develop in each member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.

     
  • richardmitnick 3:24 pm on May 10, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "Scientists Use New Technology to Examine Health of Deep-Sea Corals and Find Suspected New Species", "SOLARIS": Submersible Oceanic Chemiluminescent Analyzer of Reactive Intermediate Species, , , , , Marine Biology, Multidisciplinary team of scientists utilizes new technology - SOLARIS - to determine health of Puerto Rican deep-sea corals., , Scientists found greater biodiversity than previously known in Puerto Rican waters and may have identified several suspected new species of corals., The developmental chemical sensor “SOLARIS” is used in the ocean to make measurements of a fleetingly scarce compound called superoxide., ,   

    From The Schmidt Ocean Institute And The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: “Scientists Use New Technology to Examine Health of Deep-Sea Corals and Find Suspected New Species” 

    From The Schmidt Ocean Institute

    And

    The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

    5.10.23
    Carlie Wiener
    (808) 628-8666
    cwiener@schmidtocean.org

    Multidisciplinary team of scientists utilizes new technology – SOLARIS – to determine health of Puerto Rican deep-sea corals.

    Scientists aboard Schmidt Ocean Institute’s R/V Falkor (too) [below] have returned from an expedition to study the impact of climate change on deep water corals. Scientists from the mainland U.S. and Puerto Rico found greater biodiversity than previously known in Puerto Rican waters and may have identified several suspected new species of corals, collecting over 300 samples across 75 different species. Research will be conducted in the coming months to identify and name any new species.

    2
    The developmental chemical sensor (SOLARIS) is a centerpiece of the expedition. SOLARIS is used in the ocean to make measurements of a fleetingly scarce compound called superoxide, a reactive oxygen species. SOLARIS utilizes the property chemiluminescence, a chemical reaction that produces light. The sensor SOLARIS enables scientists to bring the high-precision analyses of a chemistry laboratory to depths of up to 4500 meters to better understand the chemical dynamics of reactive oxygen, which researchers hope to use in understanding the corals’ abilities to defend against pathogens and stress.

    The 20-day expedition included researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Lehigh University, and the University of Puerto Rico, and aimed to assess the health of mesophotic corals, in low light from 200 to 500 feet (60 to 150 meters), to deep-sea corals from 60 to 6,500 feet (20 to 2,000 meters), utilizing a new technology called “SOLARIS”, which stands for “Submersible Oceanic Chemiluminescent Analyzer of Reactive Intermediate Species”.

    This sensor measures molecules known as “reactive oxygen species (ROS),” which are both essential and detrimental to the health of all living creatures. ROS are difficult to quantify as they have short lifetimes, with some existing for only 30 seconds in the marine environment. SOLARIS is a first-generation sensor that will continue to be developed and used as a framework in building future technologies for assessing ocean health. An earlier shallow-water prototype, DISCO, helped to inform SOLARIS, and was developed by Colleen Hansel of WHOI, who served as the expedition’s chief scientist, with funding from Schmidt Marine Technology Partners.

    3
    On the R/V Falkor (too), the expedition’s science team goes over recent data in the ship’s Computer Electronics Lab. Readings from sensors were used to plan dives with the remotely operated vehicle (ROV), a robot submersible that is connected to and piloted from a Control Room on the ship.

    While it is widely known that shallow-water corals are struggling due to climate change, less is understood about the health of corals in deeper waters. The researchers investigated coral health by measuring their production of the ROS superoxide and hydrogen peroxide–chemicals that animals release for basic biological functions like eating and when responding to pathogens or environmental stress. The team found that the amount of ROS formed by corals surrounding Puerto Rico varied as a function of coral species and was substantially lower than those previously observed in the Pacific Ocean. This could provide vital insight into what species and regions are more vulnerable to stress and changing ocean conditions.

    Initial results within a controlled laboratory environment also indicate that some deep-sea corals release hydrogen peroxide when wounded, which could provide a diagnostic indicator of stress that scientists may utilize in rapidly assessing the health of deep-sea coral ecosystems.

    “We believe reactive oxygen species are critical for acquiring food and fighting off pathogens,” said Hansel. “If these chemicals are protecting corals, then we may be able to help corals armor themselves from stress by better understanding the controls that promote their formation.”

    4
    A beautiful colony of Precious coral is documented on a rocky surface off the coast of Puerto Rico. Precious coral is the common name given to a genus of marine corals, Corallium.

    The scientists also used Schmidt Ocean Institute’s underwater robot, ROV SuBastian [below], to explore the mesophotic and deep sea habitats, including Whiting Seamount and a canyon southwest of Vieques Island, where the team observed 6-foot-high bamboo coral.

    At Desecheo Ridge, a part of the Desecheo National Wildlife Refuge west of Puerto Rico, scientists observed dense and diverse coral species outside the marine protected area. The team discovered a much higher diversity of corals than previously observed in Desecheo National Wildlife Refuge and surrounding waterways. Before this expedition, the region was expected to have low diversity of corals based on the few observations previously done. The new findings could provide evidence for the expansion of marine protected areas around Puerto Rico.

    This was the second expedition for Schmidt Ocean Institute’s newly launched Falkor (too)–a state-of-the-art global class ocean research vessel available to the international scientific community to conduct groundbreaking research and test new technologies at no cost in exchange for making their research and discoveries publicly available.

    “Through technological advancement, Schmidt Ocean Institute catalyzes the discoveries needed to understand our ocean. We are delighted to assist in testing prototype sensors such as SOLARIS,” said SOI Executive Director Dr. Jyotika Virmani. “We also think it is important that scientists and students participate in expeditions that take place within their country’s waters and were pleased to welcome researchers from Puerto Rico on board R/V Falkor (too) to discover the wonders that lie hidden just off their coastline.”

    See the full article here.

    Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

    five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

    Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

    Stem Education Coalition

    Mission Statement

    The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is dedicated to advancing knowledge of the ocean and its connection with the Earth system through a sustained commitment to excellence in science, engineering, and education, and to the application of this knowledge to problems facing society.

    Vision & Mission

    The ocean is a defining feature of our planet and crucial to life on Earth, yet it remains one of the planet’s last unexplored frontiers. For this reason, WHOI scientists and engineers are committed to understanding all facets of the ocean as well as its complex connections with Earth’s atmosphere, land, ice, seafloor, and life—including humanity. This is essential not only to advance knowledge about our planet, but also to ensure society’s long-term welfare and to help guide human stewardship of the environment. WHOI researchers are also dedicated to training future generations of ocean science leaders, to providing unbiased information that informs public policy and decision-making, and to expanding public awareness about the importance of the global ocean and its resources.

    The Institution is organized into six departments, the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Ocean Research, and a marine policy center. Its shore-based facilities are located in the village of Woods Hole, Massachusetts and a mile and a half away on the Quissett Campus. The bulk of the Institution’s funding comes from grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation and other government agencies, augmented by foundations and private donations.

    WHOI scientists, engineers, and students collaborate to develop theories, test ideas, build seagoing instruments, and collect data in diverse marine environments. Ships operated by WHOI carry research scientists throughout the world’s oceans. The WHOI fleet includes two large research vessels (R/V Atlantis and R/V Neil Armstrong); the coastal craft Tioga; small research craft such as the dive-operation work boat Echo; the deep-diving human-occupied submersible Alvin; the tethered, remotely operated vehicle Jason/Medea; and autonomous underwater vehicles such as the REMUS and SeaBED.


    WHOI offers graduate and post-doctoral studies in marine science. There are several fellowship and training programs, and graduate degrees are awarded through a joint program with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. WHOI is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges . WHOI also offers public outreach programs and informal education through its Exhibit Center and summer tours. The Institution has a volunteer program and a membership program, WHOI Associate.

    On October 1, 2020, Peter B. de Menocal became the institution’s eleventh president and director.

    History

    In 1927, a National Academy of Sciences committee concluded that it was time to “consider the share of the United States of America in a worldwide program of oceanographic research.” The committee’s recommendation for establishing a permanent independent research laboratory on the East Coast to “prosecute oceanography in all its branches” led to the founding in 1930 of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

    A $2.5 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation supported the summer work of a dozen scientists, construction of a laboratory building and commissioning of a research vessel, the 142-foot (43 m) ketch R/V Atlantis, whose profile still forms the Institution’s logo.

    WHOI grew substantially to support significant defense-related research during World War II, and later began a steady growth in staff, research fleet, and scientific stature. From 1950 to 1956, the director was Dr. Edward “Iceberg” Smith, an Arctic explorer, oceanographer and retired Coast Guard rear admiral.

    In 1977 the institution appointed the influential oceanographer John Steele as director, and he served until his retirement in 1989.

    On 1 September 1985, a joint French-American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution identified the location of the wreck of the RMS Titanic which sank off the coast of Newfoundland 15 April 1912.

    On 3 April 2011, within a week of resuming of the search operation for Air France Flight 447, a team led by WHOI, operating full ocean depth autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) owned by the Waitt Institute discovered, by means of sidescan sonar, a large portion of debris field from flight AF447.

    In March 2017 the institution effected an open-access policy to make its research publicly accessible online.

    The Institution has maintained a long and controversial business collaboration with the treasure hunter company Odyssey Marine. Likewise, WHOI has participated in the location of the San José galleon in Colombia for the commercial exploitation of the shipwreck by the Government of President Santos and a private company.

    In 2019, iDefense reported that China’s hackers had launched cyberattacks on dozens of academic institutions in an attempt to gain information on technology being developed for the United States Navy. Some of the targets included the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The attacks have been underway since at least April 2017.

    Introducing The Schmidt Ocean Institute

    Our Vision
    The world’s oceans understood through technological advancement, intelligent observation, and open sharing of information.

    Schmidt Ocean Institute R/V Falkor no longer in service.

    Schmidt Ocean Institute ROV Subastian

    The Schmidt Ocean Institute is a 501(c)(3) private non-profit operating foundation established in March 2009 to advance oceanographic research, discovery, and knowledge, and catalyze sharing of information about the oceans.

    Since the Earth’s oceans are a critically endangered and least understood part of the environment, the Institute dedicates its efforts to their comprehensive understanding across intentionally broad scope of research objectives.

    Eric and Wendy Schmidt established The Schmidt Ocean Institute in 2009 as a seagoing research facility operator, to support oceanographic research and technology development focusing on accelerating the pace in ocean sciences with operational, technological, and informational innovations. The Institute is devoted to the inspirational vision of our Founders that the advancement of technology and open sharing of information will remain crucial to expanding the understanding of the world’s oceans.

    The Schmidt Ocean Institute was established in 2009 by philanthropists Eric and Wendy Schmidt to catalyze the discoveries needed to understand our ocean, sustain life, and ensure the health of our planet. Schmidt Ocean Institute pursues impactful scientific research and intelligent observation, technological advancement, open sharing of information, and public engagement at the highest levels of international excellence. For more information, visit http://www.schmidtocean.org.

     
  • richardmitnick 1:18 pm on May 3, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "How do you study one of the world’s rarest whales?", , , , Marine Biology, Mongabay, The North Pacific right whale.   

    From Mongabay Via Duke University : “How do you study one of the world’s rarest whales?” 

    From Mongabay

    Via

    Duke University

    4.25.23
    Dana Wright

    1
    The North Pacific right whale. https://news.mongabay.com

    -Researcher Dana Wright is one of a handful of scientists studying one of the world’s rarest creatures, the North Pacific right whale.
    -With about 500 individuals remaining, and its eastern population that swims off the coast of North America totaling perhaps 30 individuals, it’s so rare that in a decade of research, she has yet to see a living individual of the population, though her colleagues have.
    -How does one study a creature that’s so hard to document? With tools like bioacoustics, for example, and Wright has listened to tens of thousands of hours of recordings to aid the conservation of these endangered animals.
    -The team continues to develop new approaches to solving the mystery of these whales’ migratory patterns and biology with a goal of identifying — and then protecting — the location of their winter calving grounds.
    _________________________________________________________________________________________________

    “Nearly twice the size of Africa, the North Pacific seems to be endless. But somewhere in that vast ocean, 30 eastern North Pacific right whales (Eubalaena japonica) live their lives, mostly out of the view of human observers. These remaining leviathans are the survivors of past Yankee whaling – in Herman Melville’s famous words “so remorseless a havoc” – and are the most endangered population of whales on our planet. Historically this population numbered in the tens of thousands. I am one of the handful of scientists actively working toward their conservation. I also happen to be someone who’s never seen a living North Pacific right whale.

    I started working with this species nearly a decade ago when I was hired to analyze underwater acoustic recordings on the presumed feeding ground of these whales in the southern Bering Sea off Alaska. Laboriously, I reviewed every minute of every recording looking for right whale calls, because computer algorithms still struggle to find right whale calls amidst the cacophony of animal sounds in this region. In total, I have analyzed tens of thousands of hours of recordings, listening and looking for right whales. As I worked through these recordings, I came to recognize the seasonal patterns of their calls on the feeding grounds, first appearing in late spring and then disappearing in late fall as the sea ice approached. I observed this rhythmic relationship with sea ice for over a dozen marine mammal species, that together create a symphony of sound that ebbs and flows with the seasons.

    Each time I stopped hearing the right whales in the fall, I wondered if that would be the last time that I would ever hear them. Would they return in the spring? Would there be any left to come back? Was this the last record of their existence?

    2
    A North Pacific right whale. Photo courtesy of NOAA.

    When I began analyzing each spring recording, I’d get nervous when I didn’t hear them right away. May 15th – nothing. May 16th – nothing. May 26th – nothing.

    What if there is just nothing?

    Then, finally, when their distinctive calls reappear, I’ve felt a rush of relief. At least one, I’d think.

    There’s at least one.

    With so few surviving eastern North Pacific right whales in such an enormous area, scientists struggle to track their lives and movements, and lack the information needed to protect them.

    “Not only are these whales exceptionally rare,” says my colleague Jessica Crance, a marine mammal biologist at the NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center whose been studying this species for 15 years, “but you’re dealing with survivors of a population that was decimated by whaling, so whenever a vessel approaches, they stop calling, their surfacing behavior becomes erratic and unpredictable; they’re extremely difficult to study.”

    One of the greatest mysteries regarding these whales has remained unanswered for over a century. Perplexingly, outside of summer – when animals feed in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea – the whales simply disappear. The location of their winter calving grounds – where whales give birth and nurse their young – has been debated by scientists for decades, with some long-standing bets still waiting to be settled.

    4
    North Pacific right whale sightings, past and present. Map includes historical (1820-1860) whaling data for North Pacific right whales (dark gray circles) and recent sightings (1970-present; purple circles). Light gray circles indicate locations of whaling vessels. Whaling data were obtained from the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Recent sighting data were provided by the NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center Marine Mammal Laboratory. Map courtesy of Dana Wright.

    “There are some tantalizing records of right whales off California and the Baja Peninsula,” says Dr. Phillip Clapham, Senior Scientist at Seastar Scientific, who has written seminal papers on North Pacific right whale distribution and whaling (and formerly was my boss). “While those records are sparse, the presence of right whales in that region indicates that it may have been a major winter habitat for the population before whaling began in the 1840s. It’s worth noting that right whales had been almost wiped out from their Gulf of Alaska feeding grounds before there was any significant European settlement in California – so if they were there in big numbers before whaling, there probably wouldn’t have been settlers around to record that,” he said.

    “I’ve always wondered about the northwestern Hawaiian Islands,” says my PhD advisor Andy Read, Marine Mammal Commissioner and Stephen A. Toth Professor at Duke University, “but I think it’s quite conceivable that the last few remaining animals in the eastern population may not use coastal waters; maybe they’re offshore, which is why we haven’t seen them.”

    Most of the lucky few who have seen North Pacific right whales recently are non-scientists. One whale was seen by beach strollers off La Jolla, CA, in 2017. Another was seen from a sailboat off of Malibu, CA, that same year. Another right whale was seen by a group of sixth grade school children on a field trip off of Santa Barbara, CA, in 1981. The most recent sighting is of one spotted by a whale watching vessel in Monterey Bay, CA, in March 2023. Needless to say, every one of these sightings has provided important insight into the distribution of these extremely rare whales.

    But these recent observations also raise more questions. If right whales are overwintering off southern California, why aren’t sightings more regular? Perhaps the small number of whales is simply being missed, or they may be misidentified as gray whales. For example, the 2017 La Jolla sighting was originally identified as a gray whale before photographs were shared on social media and experts correctly identified the species. In addition, the most recently seen right whale, spotted by whale watchers off Monterey last month, had barnacles on the head and flipper, termed ‘humpback whale barnacles,’ potentially camouflaging the animal from being correctly identified from a casual glance at sea.

    To Kevin Campion, boat captain and founder of the nonprofit Save the North Pacific Right Whale, outreach is crucial for North Pacific right whale conservation. “The more people who know about these whales, the more correct sightings will be made. The more people will care. The more people will be invested in their future.”

    4
    North Pacific right whales south of Kodiak Island, Alaska, 2021. Image captured by scientists working under NOAA permit 20465.

    Calving grounds need conserving

    Why does uncovering the mystery of their overwintering grounds matter? Winter is a particularly vulnerable time for North Pacific right whales, because it is when we believe females are giving birth and nursing their newborn calves, assuming they have a similar life history to right whales in other parts of the world.

    “I think the most fundamental threat or limitation is really our lack of knowledge about the basic biology of the species – where they are, and when they are there,” says Read. “Without knowledge of where they are, it’s hard to assess the relative importance of potential threat such as ship strikes or entanglement. We know where fisheries occur [and] we know where vessels are transiting, but we don’t know where the whales are. So, without better information on their movement and distribution patterns, it’s hard to conserve them.”

    As Read notes, the two primary threats to these whales on the feeding ground are entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with large ships. Their Bering Sea feeding grounds support some of the largest fisheries on the planet. To date, we have not documented any deaths of eastern North Pacific right whales in fishing gear, but some individuals bear scars from past entanglements. In addition, numerous right whales in the (presumed separate) western North Pacific population have been observed entangled in fishing gear and we know that entanglement poses a critical threat to North Atlantic right whales.

    Collisions with large ships are the second leading cause of mortality for North Atlantic right whales, and pose a significant potential risk to their North Pacific cousins.

    In fact, two-thirds of right whale mortalities in North Atlantic waters are missed despite occurring in urban regions, emphasizing how unlikely it is to see a dead right whale in the Pacific. Acoustic recordings revealed that North Pacific right whales transit through one of the busiest passageways in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, Unimak Pass, which is a main marine highway between the United States and Asia. Vessel collisions are a particular concern at such chokepoints, particularly with the projected increase in Arctic shipping spurred by a warming climate and disappearance of sea ice.

    5
    North Atlantic right whale entangled in fishing rope since March, 2021, with her calf: this image was created in January, 2022. Photo courtesy of Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission/NOAA via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

    The enormous habitat and tiny population size of eastern North Pacific right whales means that alternative monitoring approaches are needed. Yet, despite their protection under the U.S. Endangered Species and Marine Mammal Protection Acts, there has been no dedicated federal funding for eastern North Pacific right since 2011.

    “The lack of dedicated funding for North Pacific right whale is probably the biggest roadblock to us better understanding the species and thus being able to develop useful recovery actions and tools,” says Dr. Jenna Malek of the Alaska Regional Office.

    A draft recovery plan was published in 2013, but the document notes that, with so little information available on their distribution and abundance, it is not possible to develop specific conservation measures. Last year, a petition was filed jointly by the Center for Biological Diversity and Save the North Pacific Right Whale to expand critical habitat of the species, but no specific conservation actions have been taken to date. This is in stark contrast to the North Atlantic right whale, which received more than $50 million in the recent federal omnibus spending bill. The outlook for the North Atlantic right whale continues to be uncertain, but this level of funding helps to give the 350 remaining whales in that population a fighting chance.

    The landscape of right whale research in the Pacific

    Despite limited funding, scientists have been developing creative solutions to studying the distribution and migratory patterns of these whales. Among the most fruitful monitoring approaches to date is the use of passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) – listening for the calls of whales underwater. Long-term recorders can listen for months at a given location, providing insight into seasonality and distribution, and this currently comprises the bulk of research on this species. In addition, some acoustic recorders can transmit detections in real time, allowing scientists onboard research vessels to find these elusive whales, even in bad weather, and the weather is almost always bad in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea.

    North Pacific right whales have been seen and heard north of their core feeding ground in recent years. Some scientists attribute this apparent shift to changes in the abundance of their planktonic prey caused by warming ocean temperatures, as has occurred for North Atlantic right whales. Indeed, smaller, less energy-rich prey species were observed in the subarctic following a winter with record low ice extent.

    Despite these advances, any animal calling outside of the detection range of these recorders will be missed – and it is an enormous ocean. Mobile recording platforms, such as underwater gliders (unmanned underwater vehicles like drones), can listen over larger areas, but these are expensive, and it is simply impractical to deploy fixed recorders or gliders over an area the same size as Africa.

    Alternatively, some individual whales have been equipped with tags that transmit signals to satellites, allowing scientists to track the animal for days or weeks. These tags have provided critical information on habitat use and movement on the feeding grounds. However, field work is expensive, the whales are elusive, and tagging can be a polarizing topic. Other scientists are developing new methods to identify whales in high-resolution images taken from low-orbit satellites.

    “I’m really excited about the possibility of using satellite imagery to help study North Pacific right whales in the future,” says Crance. “While still a very new field with many challenges, it has already shown a lot of promise for North Atlantic right whales.”

    Another promising technique in helping to decipher the distribution and migratory routes of whales is from chemical analyses of their tissues. Stable isotopes – a type of chemical tracer – flow through food webs and ecosystems following the laws of chemistry and physics. The ratios of these isotopes vary predictably at the base of food webs, making it possible to obtain information about where whales have been. This approach can be applied to a variety of tissues, each providing a unique window into the whales’ past lives.

    For example, skin samples reflect a composite of prior weeks to months, providing a snapshot of relatively recent ecological history. In contrast, plates of inert keratinous tissue called baleen grow continuously from the upper jaw of right whales, like hair growing from our heads. The baleen acts as a recorder of stable isotope ratios, which allows scientists to reconstruct years of ecological history for an individual whale. I am investigating whether North Pacific right whale baleen can be used to reconstruct past movements of these whales. The fundamental limitation of this approach is that it’s only feasible with dead whales or museum specimens, and only a half-dozen North Pacific right whale baleen plates exist in the U.S. Most of these plates were obtained from animals killed during the commercial whaling era. So, ironically, the baleen of animals killed during the whaling era may help to conserve their descendants.

    Baleen plates were originally saved during the commercial whaling era by naturalists who hoped the plates could be used to age the animals. However, like our hair, baleen continuously sloughs and breaks at the edge, and therefore cannot be used to age animals. Once this was discovered, many baleen collections were nearly discarded because they were considered essentially useless and bulky to store in museums. Only a handful of North Pacific right whale baleen plates exist in the U.S. today, but no naturalist or scientist in the 19th century could have imagined the level of insight we can glean from these tissues using today’s technology.

    It is impossible not to reflect on the history of each North Pacific right whale plate housed in the U.S. The oldest known plate is housed at the Smithsonian Institution and was collected in 1862. When I sampled this plate, I noticed that it was covered in dust and looked desiccated, fragile. Attached to the plate with string was the original collection tag, yellow and worn, listing in black cursive ink the cataloguer, C.M. Scammon.

    6
    Dana Wright with a baleen plate ready for sampling at Burke Museum, University of Washington, December 2022. Image courtesy of the author.

    All the 19th century North Pacific right whale specimens housed at the Smithsonian were collected by the whaling captain, naturalist, and author Charles Melville Scammon. He is an enigma to many because he successfully hunted whales in the mid 19th century, but was also one of their strongest advocates in later years. He even wrote a novel about how whaling induced an imbalance in nature, using the California gray whale, a species he hunted, as an example.

    The only 20th century North Pacific right whale baleen plate housed at the Smithsonian came from one of three adult males killed off Kodiak, Alaska, on August 16th, 1961, under Japan’s special permit of article VIII of the Convention for the Regulation of Whaling. Another plate from the U.S. collection is stored in a private collection, passed down from father to son. The marine biologist father was gifted the plate from his superior for his work for the Canadian Government at the Coal Harbor Whaling Station. The plate comes from an adult male that was illegally killed off British Columbia as part of the whaling operation in the summer of 1951, with the father intervening to prevent the animal from being rendered. It would be another 60 years before a right whale was again seen in B.C. waters. Encouragingly, additional whales have been seen in this area.

    While I undoubtedly would prefer that the whales whose baleen sits today in collections across the U.S. had not been killed, I’m glad that Scammon and others saved a few plates that we can use to answer questions regarding their conservation.

    Like good detectives, we scientists will continue to develop new approaches to solving the great mystery of these whales’ migratory patterns and biology. Someday soon, one of these approaches will identify the grand prize – the location of the winter calving ground. Then, hopefully, the necessary protective measures can be implemented to ensure that whales are protected during this vulnerable period of their lives. Until then, our work continues.

     
  • richardmitnick 9:05 am on April 21, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "Q&A - Two ways UW researchers are studying marine microplastics", , , , Marine Biology, , Study: How microplastics are affecting coral reef ecosystems, Study: How microplastics move across the ocean surface, , Tiny pieces of plastic in the ocean might seem innocuous on their own but their growing presence is a frustrating issue facing marine ecosystems.   

    From The University of Washington : “Q&A – Two ways UW researchers are studying marine microplastics” 

    From The University of Washington

    4.19.23
    Hannah Hickey
    Sarah McQuate

    1
    Jacqueline Padilla-Gamiño, an associate professor in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences (left), and Jeremy Axworthy, a UW doctoral student in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, observe a demonstration of a coral feeding on microplastics in 2019. Credit: Dennis Wise/University of Washington.

    Tiny pieces of plastic in the ocean might seem innocuous on their own, but their growing presence is a frustrating issue facing marine ecosystems. The particles’ small size makes them difficult to clean up, and it also allows them to easily burrow into marine environments or even get ingested by ocean organisms.

    Two University of Washington researchers are using very different methods to investigate the issue of marine microplastics. Jacqueline Padilla-Gamiño, a UW associate professor of aquatic and fishery sciences, received a grant to study how microplastics are affecting coral reef ecosystems. Michelle DiBenedetto, a UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering, received a separate grant to study how microplastics move across the ocean surface.

    2
    Michelle DiBenedetto, UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering (foreground), and Luci Baker, a UW postdoctoral fellow in mechanical engineering, monitor plastic particles in a wave tank during an experiment in 2022. The team has cameras, two of which are shown here (black boxes, center right), set up to track how the particles move through the water. Credit: Dennis Wise/University of Washington.

    For Earth Day, UW News asked them to discuss their research.

    3
    Jacqueline Padilla-Gamiño University of Washington.

    Professor Padilla-Gamiño, your lab’s experimental study in 2019 [Scientific Reports (below)]showed that corals are ingesting microplastics along with their typical food. Why are microplastics a problem for corals and other marine organisms?

    Jacqueline Padilla-Gamiño: This material can prevent them from feeding, or damage their tissues. Plastics also contain plasticizers — chemicals used to provide flexibility and to reduce brittleness — which may cause hormone disruption and affect the organisms’ reproduction.

    What have you learned since then?

    JPG: We have continued to explore the abundance and diversity of microplastics in coral reefs, including in water, sediments and other organisms, such as sea cucumbers.

    We are also doing other experiments to learn how different types of plastics can affect the performance of corals, because not all plastics are the same.

    3
    Under a black light, fluorescent green microplastics are seen in the water during a small demonstration experiment. In the 2018 experiment described in Padilla-Gamiño’s paper, cauliflower coral (above) ingested microplastics when prey was also present in the water, but avoided eating microplastics when no prey was there. Credit: Dennis Wise/University of Washington.

    It’s scary to think that corals and other marine organisms, which are already stressed by warming and acidifying oceans, are at the same time also consuming microplastics. How can research offer any hope?

    JPG: Research can help us to understand what species are more sensitive to plastics. It can also help us to generate ecological baselines that can be used to assess impacts. Both can help us design strategies to reduce plastic pollution’s impacts.

    What motivated you to incorporate microplastics into your wider area of research on how climate change affects marine organisms?

    JPG: Plastic pollution is a global problem and it is also a carbon dioxide problem. The process of plastic manufacturing creates more than a billion tons of greenhouse gasses per year. At least 14 million tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year. We need to understand the impacts of these plastics in marine ecosystems.

    3
    Michelle DiBenedetto. Credit: University of Washington.

    Professor DiBenedetto, what motivated you to study the movement of microplastics?

    Michelle DiBenedetto: Plastic pollution is a relatively new issue and there is still a lot we do not know about what happens to plastic once it is in the ocean. For example, we do not know exactly how long it takes to degrade in the ocean, where it might settle out or at what rates it will be deposited on our beaches.

    Many of these processes are influenced by the fluid dynamics in the ocean, such as waves, turbulence, wind and currents. How plastic behaves and is transported in the ocean is an interesting problem because plastic is different from traditionally studied ocean topics, such as bubbles, oil spills, sediment and biology. Thus, it leads to a lot of interesting physical questions that we can study in the lab.

    Can you describe what those experiments look like?

    MD: We turn on an adjustable wind tunnel that blows over the surface of a wave tank. This creates waves, turbulence and current in the water.

    Next, we release particles upstream in the tank. In the middle of the tank, we have an area where we can take images of the particles. We use cameras and lighting to illuminate the particles so we can track their position and orientation (when using non-spherical particles). We either track the particle shadows, or we track the particles themselves.

    4
    Michelle DiBenedetto and team study different sizes and shapes of plastic particles. One variety is shown here. Credit: Dennis Wise/University of Washington.

    How will tracking the particles in this way better inform our knowledge of microplastics transport in the ocean? Could this potentially help us design future cleanup methods?

    MD: The goal of this research is to be able to develop a fundamental model for microplastics’ vertical distribution at the ocean surface: How far below the surface do we expect buoyant microplastics to be mixed under different conditions?

    This model would increase the accuracy of simulations of microplastics transport (ocean currents are typically faster at the surface) and degradation rates (sunlight degrades microplastics and is strongest at the surface). A model would also decrease uncertainty in measurements — we have many surface measurements of microplastics, but these need to be corrected for the number of microplastics mixed below the surface.

    To design effective cleanup methods, we need to know how fast microplastics leave the ocean surface naturally, so that we can decide the value in designing cleanup methods — or focus our energies on polluting less plastic in the first place. This work’s goal is to better our understanding of plastic’s natural transport and fate in the ocean so we can decide how best to manage it.

    Scientific Reports 2019

    See the full article here .

    Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.


    five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

    Please help promote STEM in your local schools.
    Stem Education Coalition

    u-washington-campus

    The University of Washington is one of the world’s preeminent public universities. Our impact on individuals, on our region, and on the world is profound — whether we are launching young people into a boundless future or confronting the grand challenges of our time through undaunted research and scholarship. Ranked number 10 in the world in Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings and educating more than 54,000 students annually, our students and faculty work together to turn ideas into impact and in the process transform lives and our world. For more about our impact on the world, every day.

    So what defines us —the students, faculty and community members at the University of Washington? Above all, it’s our belief in possibility and our unshakable optimism. It’s a connection to others, both near and far. It’s a hunger that pushes us to tackle challenges and pursue progress. It’s the conviction that together we can create a world of good. Join us on the journey.

    The University of Washington is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in downtown Seattle approximately a decade after the city’s founding to aid its economic development. Today, the university’s 703-acre main Seattle campus is in the University District above the Montlake Cut, within the urban Puget Sound region of the Pacific Northwest. The university has additional campuses in Tacoma and Bothell. Overall, University of Washington encompasses over 500 buildings and over 20 million gross square footage of space, including one of the largest library systems in the world with more than 26 university libraries, as well as the UW Tower, lecture halls, art centers, museums, laboratories, stadiums, and conference centers. The university offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees through 140 departments in various colleges and schools, sees a total student enrollment of roughly 46,000 annually, and functions on a quarter system.

    University of Washington is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation, UW spent $1.41 billion on research and development in 2018, ranking it 5th in the nation. As the flagship institution of the six public universities in Washington state, it is known for its medical, engineering and scientific research as well as its highly competitive computer science and engineering programs. Additionally, University of Washington continues to benefit from its deep historic ties and major collaborations with numerous technology giants in the region, such as Amazon, Boeing, Nintendo, and particularly Microsoft. Paul G. Allen, Bill Gates and others spent significant time at Washington computer labs for a startup venture before founding Microsoft and other ventures. The University of Washington’s 22 varsity sports teams are also highly competitive, competing as the Huskies in the Pac-12 Conference of the NCAA Division I, representing the United States at the Olympic Games, and other major competitions.

    The university has been affiliated with many notable alumni and faculty, including 21 Nobel Prize laureates and numerous Pulitzer Prize winners, Fulbright Scholars, Rhodes Scholars and Marshall Scholars.

    In 1854, territorial governor Isaac Stevens recommended the establishment of a university in the Washington Territory. Prominent Seattle-area residents, including Methodist preacher Daniel Bagley, saw this as a chance to add to the city’s potential and prestige. Bagley learned of a law that allowed United States territories to sell land to raise money in support of public schools. At the time, Arthur A. Denny, one of the founders of Seattle and a member of the territorial legislature, aimed to increase the city’s importance by moving the territory’s capital from Olympia to Seattle. However, Bagley eventually convinced Denny that the establishment of a university would assist more in the development of Seattle’s economy. Two universities were initially chartered, but later the decision was repealed in favor of a single university in Lewis County provided that locally donated land was available. When no site emerged, Denny successfully petitioned the legislature to reconsider Seattle as a location in 1858.

    In 1861, scouting began for an appropriate 10 acres (4 ha) site in Seattle to serve as a new university campus. Arthur and Mary Denny donated eight acres, while fellow pioneers Edward Lander, and Charlie and Mary Terry, donated two acres on Denny’s Knoll in downtown Seattle. More specifically, this tract was bounded by 4th Avenue to the west, 6th Avenue to the east, Union Street to the north, and Seneca Streets to the south.

    John Pike, for whom Pike Street is named, was the university’s architect and builder. It was opened on November 4, 1861, as the Territorial University of Washington. The legislature passed articles incorporating the University, and establishing its Board of Regents in 1862. The school initially struggled, closing three times: in 1863 for low enrollment, and again in 1867 and 1876 due to funds shortage. University of Washington awarded its first graduate Clara Antoinette McCarty Wilt in 1876, with a bachelor’s degree in science.

    19th century relocation

    By the time Washington state entered the Union in 1889, both Seattle and the University had grown substantially. University of Washington’s total undergraduate enrollment increased from 30 to nearly 300 students, and the campus’s relative isolation in downtown Seattle faced encroaching development. A special legislative committee, headed by University of Washington graduate Edmond Meany, was created to find a new campus to better serve the growing student population and faculty. The committee eventually selected a site on the northeast of downtown Seattle called Union Bay, which was the land of the Duwamish, and the legislature appropriated funds for its purchase and construction. In 1895, the University relocated to the new campus by moving into the newly built Denny Hall. The University Regents tried and failed to sell the old campus, eventually settling with leasing the area. This would later become one of the University’s most valuable pieces of real estate in modern-day Seattle, generating millions in annual revenue with what is now called the Metropolitan Tract. The original Territorial University building was torn down in 1908, and its former site now houses the Fairmont Olympic Hotel.

    The sole-surviving remnants of Washington’s first building are four 24-foot (7.3 m), white, hand-fluted cedar, Ionic columns. They were salvaged by Edmond S. Meany, one of the University’s first graduates and former head of its history department. Meany and his colleague, Dean Herbert T. Condon, dubbed the columns as “Loyalty,” “Industry,” “Faith”, and “Efficiency”, or “LIFE.” The columns now stand in the Sylvan Grove Theater.

    20th century expansion

    Organizers of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition eyed the still largely undeveloped campus as a prime setting for their world’s fair. They came to an agreement with Washington’s Board of Regents that allowed them to use the campus grounds for the exposition, surrounding today’s Drumheller Fountain facing towards Mount Rainier. In exchange, organizers agreed Washington would take over the campus and its development after the fair’s conclusion. This arrangement led to a detailed site plan and several new buildings, prepared in part by John Charles Olmsted. The plan was later incorporated into the overall University of Washington campus master plan, permanently affecting the campus layout.

    Both World Wars brought the military to campus, with certain facilities temporarily lent to the federal government. In spite of this, subsequent post-war periods were times of dramatic growth for the University. The period between the wars saw a significant expansion of the upper campus. Construction of the Liberal Arts Quadrangle, known to students as “The Quad,” began in 1916 and continued to 1939. The University’s architectural centerpiece, Suzzallo Library, was built in 1926 and expanded in 1935.

    After World War II, further growth came with the G.I. Bill. Among the most important developments of this period was the opening of the School of Medicine in 1946, which is now consistently ranked as the top medical school in the United States. It would eventually lead to the University of Washington Medical Center, ranked by U.S. News and World Report as one of the top ten hospitals in the nation.

    In 1942, all persons of Japanese ancestry in the Seattle area were forced into inland internment camps as part of Executive Order 9066 following the attack on Pearl Harbor. During this difficult time, university president Lee Paul Sieg took an active and sympathetic leadership role in advocating for and facilitating the transfer of Japanese American students to universities and colleges away from the Pacific Coast to help them avoid the mass incarceration. Nevertheless, many Japanese American students and “soon-to-be” graduates were unable to transfer successfully in the short time window or receive diplomas before being incarcerated. It was only many years later that they would be recognized for their accomplishments during the University of Washington’s Long Journey Home ceremonial event that was held in May 2008.

    From 1958 to 1973, the University of Washington saw a tremendous growth in student enrollment, its faculties and operating budget, and also its prestige under the leadership of Charles Odegaard. University of Washington student enrollment had more than doubled to 34,000 as the baby boom generation came of age. However, this era was also marked by high levels of student activism, as was the case at many American universities. Much of the unrest focused around civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. In response to anti-Vietnam War protests by the late 1960s, the University Safety and Security Division became the University of Washington Police Department.

    Odegaard instituted a vision of building a “community of scholars”, convincing the Washington State legislatures to increase investment in the University. Washington senators, such as Henry M. Jackson and Warren G. Magnuson, also used their political clout to gather research funds for the University of Washington. The results included an increase in the operating budget from $37 million in 1958 to over $400 million in 1973, solidifying University of Washington as a top recipient of federal research funds in the United States. The establishment of technology giants such as Microsoft, Boeing and Amazon in the local area also proved to be highly influential in the University of Washington’s fortunes, not only improving graduate prospects but also helping to attract millions of dollars in university and research funding through its distinguished faculty and extensive alumni network.

    21st century

    In 1990, the University of Washington opened its additional campuses in Bothell and Tacoma. Although originally intended for students who have already completed two years of higher education, both schools have since become four-year universities with the authority to grant degrees. The first freshman classes at these campuses started in fall 2006. Today both Bothell and Tacoma also offer a selection of master’s degree programs.

    In 2012, the University began exploring plans and governmental approval to expand the main Seattle campus, including significant increases in student housing, teaching facilities for the growing student body and faculty, as well as expanded public transit options. The University of Washington light rail station was completed in March 2015, connecting Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood to the University of Washington Husky Stadium within five minutes of rail travel time. It offers a previously unavailable option of transportation into and out of the campus, designed specifically to reduce dependence on private vehicles, bicycles and local King County buses.

    University of Washington has been listed as a “Public Ivy” in Greene’s Guides since 2001, and is an elected member of the American Association of Universities. Among the faculty by 2012, there have been 151 members of American Association for the Advancement of Science, 68 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 67 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 53 members of the National Academy of Medicine, 29 winners of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, 21 members of the National Academy of Engineering, 15 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators, 15 MacArthur Fellows, 9 winners of the Gairdner Foundation International Award, 5 winners of the National Medal of Science, 7 Nobel Prize laureates, 5 winners of Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research, 4 members of the American Philosophical Society, 2 winners of the National Book Award, 2 winners of the National Medal of Arts, 2 Pulitzer Prize winners, 1 winner of the Fields Medal, and 1 member of the National Academy of Public Administration. Among UW students by 2012, there were 136 Fulbright Scholars, 35 Rhodes Scholars, 7 Marshall Scholars and 4 Gates Cambridge Scholars. UW is recognized as a top producer of Fulbright Scholars, ranking 2nd in the US in 2017.

    The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) has consistently ranked University of Washington as one of the top 20 universities worldwide every year since its first release. In 2019, University of Washington ranked 14th worldwide out of 500 by the ARWU, 26th worldwide out of 981 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and 28th worldwide out of 101 in the Times World Reputation Rankings. Meanwhile, QS World University Rankings ranked it 68th worldwide, out of over 900.

    U.S. News & World Report ranked University of Washington 8th out of nearly 1,500 universities worldwide for 2021, with University of Washington’s undergraduate program tied for 58th among 389 national universities in the U.S. and tied for 19th among 209 public universities.

    In 2019, it ranked 10th among the universities around the world by SCImago Institutions Rankings. In 2017, the Leiden Ranking, which focuses on science and the impact of scientific publications among the world’s 500 major universities, ranked University of Washington 12th globally and 5th in the U.S.

    In 2019, Kiplinger Magazine’s review of “top college values” named University of Washington 5th for in-state students and 10th for out-of-state students among U.S. public colleges, and 84th overall out of 500 schools. In the Washington Monthly National University Rankings University of Washington was ranked 15th domestically in 2018, based on its contribution to the public good as measured by social mobility, research, and promoting public service.

     
  • richardmitnick 8:20 pm on April 20, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "Centralized database helps scientists better understand coral reefs", , Biological Geochemistry, , , Marine Biology, ,   

    From The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne [EPFL-École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne] (CH) : “Centralized database helps scientists better understand coral reefs” 

    From The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne [EPFL-École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne] (CH)

    4.20.23
    Sandrine Perroud

    1
    Coral reefs are under a growing threat from climate change and human activity, making it more important than ever to understand their strengths and vulnerabilities. A team of EPFL scientists has now taken an important step in this direction with the new RECIFS open-access database on reef environments.

    The Reef Environment Centralized InFormation System (RECIFS) is a web application that provides a single repository of all datasets currently available on reef environments worldwide. Developed by scientists from EPFL and the ENTROPIE research group on marine ecology for the Pacific and Indian Oceans, RECIFS lets researchers compare different datasets and gain key insight into how corals are – or are not – able to adapt to climate change and stressors from human activity.

    The datasets provided through RECIFS originate from the public domain and contain nearly four decades of environmental measurements, including both physical properties (such as water temperature, heat waves and sea-current velocity) and chemical ones (such as chlorophyll concentration, salinity and pH). These data can be used to form hypotheses on how specific environmental variables influence reef ecosystem dynamics and develop effective conservation strategies in response. RECIFS also holds data on human activity in the proximity of coral reefs, like boat traffic (which is a source of pollution), nearby cities and their population density (which can be a sign of overfishing), and agricultural land use (which can indicate fertilizer runoff into the sea). RECIFS was recently unveiled in an article appearing in Global Ecology and Biogeography [below].

    2
    Boat traffic density near Red Sea coral reefs © GEOME, LGB, EPFL

    Identifying irreversible processes

    “By creating a single repository, we can identify the factors that triggered irreversible processes in the past, like the coral bleaching caused by heat waves,” says Oliver Selmoni, the study’s lead author, who hold a PhD in environmental engineering from EPFL. “We can also investigate why some coral reefs are more resistant to these effects and set up protected marine areas where needed.” Selmoni, who won the 2020 Chorafas Prize for his research on corals, cites the damage caused by the successive heat waves occurring over the past 20 years as a result of climate change. “How many heat waves need to occur, and how severe do they need to be, for corals to be able to adapt rather than perish? Does local water pollution make reef ecosystems stronger or, on the contrary, more fragile? These are the kinds of questions we’ll be able to answer with the RECIFS repository,” says Selmoni. These questions are particularly urgent given that 14% of hard corals were lost worldwide over the past 10 years, due mainly to anomalous heat waves.

    3
    Different types of Caribbean coral off the coast of Belize © iStock.

    Two use examples

    The research was spearheaded by the Geospatial Molecular Epidemiology (GEOME) research group within EPFL’s Laboratory for Biological Geochemistry. In the recently published journal article, the authors give two examples of how RECIFS can be implemented. The first involves characterizing coral diversity in the Caribbean based on a dataset containing the results of photographic surveys of reefs across the area. The study authors crunched through the 302 environmental variables contained in RECIFS to pinpoint the specific environmental factors that can explain variations in coral diversity in different parts of the Caribbean – or in other words, why coral reefs are more diverse in some parts of the Caribbean than others.

    4
    Stripey snapper (Lutjanus carponotatus), a fish found on the northeastern coast of Australia © Fish of Australia (CC)

    The second example relates to protecting the stripey snapper, a fish that spawns in reefs located along the northwestern coast of Australia. Here, the study authors used a set of existing genomics data from 1,016 stripey snapper individuals to detect genetic markers that could indicate an enhanced ability to adapt to local climate conditions. An analysis of the 302 environmental variables found that fish living in the Shark Bay area appear to have an exceptional adaptive capacity to both thermal stress and variability in phosphate concentration.

    Selmoni came up with the idea for RECIFS after studying coral reefs in New Caledonia, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean as part of his PhD at EPFL’s School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC). The goal is to give scientists and conservation stakeholders easy, open access to the environmental data they need to help preserve coral reefs. The repository will updated on an annual basis and may be developed further.

    5
    Average heat stress southwest Pacific ocean. © GEOME, LGB, EPFL.

    Global Ecology and Biogeography
    See the science paper for instructive material with images.

    See the full article here .

    Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

    five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

    Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

    Stem Education Coalition

    EPFL bloc

    EPFL campus

    The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne [EPFL-École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne] (CH) is a research institute and university in Lausanne, Switzerland, that specializes in natural sciences and engineering. It is one of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, and it has three main missions: education, research and technology transfer.

    The QS World University Rankings ranks EPFL(CH) 14th in the world across all fields in their 2020/2021 ranking, whereas Times Higher Education World University Rankings ranks EPFL(CH) as the world’s 19th best school for Engineering and Technology in 2020.

    EPFL(CH) is located in the French-speaking part of Switzerland; the sister institution in the German-speaking part of Switzerland is The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zürich [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich] (CH). Associated with several specialized research institutes, the two universities form The Domain of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (ETH Domain) [ETH-Bereich; Domaine des Écoles Polytechniques Fédérales] (CH) which is directly dependent on the Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research. In connection with research and teaching activities, EPFL(CH) operates a nuclear reactor CROCUS; a Tokamak Fusion reactor; a Blue Gene/Q Supercomputer; and P3 bio-hazard facilities.

    ETH Zürich, EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) [École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne](CH), and four associated research institutes form The Domain of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (ETH Domain) [ETH-Bereich; Domaine des Écoles polytechniques fédérales] (CH) with the aim of collaborating on scientific projects.

    The roots of modern-day EPFL(CH) can be traced back to the foundation of a private school under the name École Spéciale de Lausanne in 1853 at the initiative of Lois Rivier, a graduate of the École Centrale Paris (FR) and John Gay the then professor and rector of the Académie de Lausanne. At its inception it had only 11 students and the offices were located at Rue du Valentin in Lausanne. In 1869, it became the technical department of the public Académie de Lausanne. When the Académie was reorganized and acquired the status of a university in 1890, the technical faculty changed its name to École d’Ingénieurs de l’Université de Lausanne. In 1946, it was renamed the École polytechnique de l’Université de Lausanne (EPUL). In 1969, the EPUL was separated from the rest of the University of Lausanne and became a federal institute under its current name. EPFL(CH), like ETH Zürich (CH), is thus directly controlled by the Swiss federal government. In contrast, all other universities in Switzerland are controlled by their respective cantonal governments. Following the nomination of Patrick Aebischer as president in 2000, EPFL(CH) has started to develop into the field of life sciences. It absorbed the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) in 2008.

    In 1946, there were 360 students. In 1969, EPFL(CH) had 1,400 students and 55 professors. In the past two decades the university has grown rapidly and as of 2012 roughly 14,000 people study or work on campus, about 9,300 of these being Bachelor, Master or PhD students. The environment at modern day EPFL(CH) is highly international with the school attracting students and researchers from all over the world. More than 125 countries are represented on the campus and the university has two official languages, French and English.

    Organization

    EPFL is organized into eight schools, themselves formed of institutes that group research units (laboratories or chairs) around common themes:

    School of Basic Sciences
    Institute of Mathematics
    Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering
    Institute of Physics
    European Centre of Atomic and Molecular Computations
    Bernoulli Center
    Biomedical Imaging Research Center
    Interdisciplinary Center for Electron Microscopy
    MPG-EPFL Centre for Molecular Nanosciences and Technology
    Swiss Plasma Center
    Laboratory of Astrophysics

    School of Engineering

    Institute of Electrical Engineering
    Institute of Mechanical Engineering
    Institute of Materials
    Institute of Microengineering
    Institute of Bioengineering

    School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Institute of Architecture
    Civil Engineering Institute
    Institute of Urban and Regional Sciences
    Environmental Engineering Institute

    School of Computer and Communication Sciences

    Algorithms & Theoretical Computer Science
    Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
    Computational Biology
    Computer Architecture & Integrated Systems
    Data Management & Information Retrieval
    Graphics & Vision
    Human-Computer Interaction
    Information & Communication Theory
    Networking
    Programming Languages & Formal Methods
    Security & Cryptography
    Signal & Image Processing
    Systems

    School of Life Sciences

    Bachelor-Master Teaching Section in Life Sciences and Technologies
    Brain Mind Institute
    Institute of Bioengineering
    Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research
    Global Health Institute
    Ten Technology Platforms & Core Facilities (PTECH)
    Center for Phenogenomics
    NCCR Synaptic Bases of Mental Diseases

    College of Management of Technology

    Swiss Finance Institute at EPFL
    Section of Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship
    Institute of Technology and Public Policy
    Institute of Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship
    Section of Financial Engineering

    College of Humanities

    Human and social sciences teaching program

    EPFL Middle East

    Section of Energy Management and Sustainability

    In addition to the eight schools there are seven closely related institutions

    Swiss Cancer Centre
    Center for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM)
    Centre for Advanced Modelling Science (CADMOS)
    École Cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL)
    Campus Biotech
    Wyss Center for Bio- and Neuro-engineering
    Swiss National Supercomputing Centre

     
  • richardmitnick 7:50 pm on April 20, 2023 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: "Scientists Aboard R/V 'Atlantis' Discover Pristine Deep-Sea Coral Reefs in the Galápagos Marine Reserve", , , Deep-sea coral reef within the Galápagos Marine Reserve, , Marine Biology,   

    From The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: “Scientists Aboard R/V ‘Atlantis’ Discover Pristine Deep-Sea Coral Reefs in the Galápagos Marine Reserve” 

    From The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

    4.20.23
    Suzanne Pelisson
    spelisson@whoi.edu
    +1-973-801 6223

    Ken Kostel
    kkostel@whoi.edu
    +1-917-743-3454

    1
    HOV Alvin’s manipulator arm collects samples from rocky outcrop at the crest of a ridge, populated by cold water corals, squat lobsters, anemones, basket stars and deep-sea fish. Credit: Image courtesy of L. Robinson (U. Bristol), D. Fornari (WHOI), M. Taylor (U. Essex), D. Wanless (Boise State U.) NSF/NERC/HOV Alvin/WHOI MISO Facility, 2023 ©Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

    Observations using the newly upgraded human-occupied vehicle Alvin are the first of a deep-sea coral reef in the Galápagos Marine Reserve.

    The reefs are located at depths between 400-600 m, atop previously unmapped seamounts.

    Galápagos, Ecuador – Scientists have discovered extensive, ancient deep-sea coral reefs within the Galápagos Marine Reserve (GMR)—the first of their kind ever to be documented inside the marine protected area (MPA) since it was established in 1998. The reef, found at 400-600 meters (1,310-1,970 feet) depth at the summit of a previously unmapped seamount in the central part of the archipelago, supports a breathtaking mix of deep marine life.

    Daniel Fornari, marine geologist, and Emeritus Research Scholar at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is a co-lead on the expedition.

    Cresting the ridge of an unmapped submerged volcano, and stretching over several kilometers, the impressive reef structure was first recorded by Dr. Michelle Taylor (University of Essex (UK)) and Dr. Stuart Banks (Charles Darwin Foundation, Ecuador) while diving in the HOV Alvin.

    .

    This is the first time Alvin has explored this region within the GMR. The submersible recently completed upgrades that included improved high-quality still and ultra-high definition 4K video imaging systems, as well as enhanced sampling capabilities, which allowed for the stunningly clear video of the newly discovered reef sites, as well as the delicate sampling required of the reef. HOV Alvin is owned by the US Navy and operated by WHOI in coordination with the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) as part of the NSF-funded National Deep Submergence Facility.

    “Exploring, mapping and sampling the Galápagos Platform with HOV Alvin and R/V Atlantis represents an opportunity to apply 21st-century deep-submergence and seafloor mapping technologies and innovative deep-sea imaging techniques to reveal the beauty and complexity of the volcanic and biological processes that makes the Galápagos so unique,” said Fornari, who has mapped and sampled the marine environment in the Galápagos for over 20 years.

    Fornari, along with Taylor and Banks, are part of an international group of scientists onboard the US Navy-owned and WHOI-operated R/V Atlantis that is undertaking the Galápagos Deep 2023 expedition.

    The expedition includes scientists at Boise State University and is in collaboration with the Galápagos National Park Directorate, Charles Darwin Foundation and Ecuadorian Navy’s Oceanographic and Antarctic Institute (INOCAR). The expedition is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Natural Environmental Research Council (UK).

    Commenting on this groundbreaking discovery, the Minister of Environment of Ecuador, Jose Antonio Dávalos said: “This is encouraging news. It reaffirms our determination to establish new marine protected areas in Ecuador and to continue promoting the creation of a regional marine protected area in the Eastern Tropical Pacific. The richness of the yet explored depths of our ocean is another reason to strive towards achieving the commitments of the Global Ocean Alliance 30×30, which aims to protect at least 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030, aligning sustainable economic activities with conservation.”

    Gail Christeson, a program director in the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Division of Ocean Sciences, said, “The discovery of this new and healthy reef illustrates the importance of international collaborations to map and image unexplored regions of the seafloor.”

    Prior to this discovery, Wellington Reef off the coast of Darwin Island in the far north of the archipelago was thought to be among the few structural shallow coral reefs in the Galápagos Islands to have survived the 1982-83 El Niño event. The new discovery made during dives by scientists in the HOV Alvin shows that sheltered deep-water coral communities have likely persisted for centuries in the depths of the GMR, supporting rich, diverse, and potentially unique marine communities.

    Dr. Stuart Banks, Senior Marine Researcher at the Charles Darwin Foundation, and national observer on this expedition adds: “The captivating thing about these reefs is that they are very old and essentially pristine, unlike those found in many other parts of the world’s oceans. This gives us reference points to understand their importance for marine natural biodiversity heritage, connectivity with regional MPAs, as well as their role in providing goods and services such as carbon cycling and fisheries. It also helps us reconstruct past ocean environments to understand modern climate change. Open waters cover over 95% of the known GMR, of which less than 5% have been explored through modern research expeditions. It’s very likely there are more reef structures across different depths waiting to be explored. We’ll forge ahead with the GNPD and partners to help ensure that such newly discovered habitats are folded into the GMR and Hermandad Marine Reserve planning process and recognized as part of their considerable world heritage value”.

    Dr. Michelle Taylor, co-lead of the expedition and Chair of the Deep Sea Society from the University of Essex notes the importance of this discovery for deep sea habitats: “The discovered reef is novel for several reasons – in shallow reefs where finding 10-20% of coral cover would be considered a relatively unhealthy reef, in the deep-sea this is the norm. Dead coral skeletons making up the remaining 80-90% still provide homes for a huge diversity of life, which is less reliant on the live sections of coral. However, the reefs we’ve found in the last few days have 50-60% live coral in many areas, which is very rare indeed. The reef is pristine and teeming with life – pink octopus, batfish, squat lobsters and an array of deep-sea fish, sharks, and rays. This newly discovered reef is potentially an area of global significance – a canary in the mine for other reefs globally – a site we can monitor over time to see how a pristine habitat evolves with our current climate crisis.”

    Scientific findings such as this help inform effective management and conservation actions. The discovery also comes at a time when the Eastern Tropical Pacific countries of Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Ecuador are actively collaborating through a regional Marine Corridor (CMAR) initiative to protect and responsibly manage the ocean upon which we as people depend. Newly declared MPAs such as the Hermandad Marine Reserve (HMR) now connect seamounts in Ecuadorian waters to offshore marine environments such as Costa Rica’s Cocos Island National Park. Natural oceanographic and marine processes transcend national boundaries, which underscores the need for special measures that protect foraging grounds, migratory routes for marine life and sustain responsible fisheries.

    For more information about the expedition objectives, scientists, and the R/V Atlantis and HOV Alvin, please visit: https://galapagosdeep2023.com/

    See the full article here .

    Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

    five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

    Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

    Stem Education Coalition

    Mission Statement

    The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is dedicated to advancing knowledge of the ocean and its connection with the Earth system through a sustained commitment to excellence in science, engineering, and education, and to the application of this knowledge to problems facing society.

    Vision & Mission

    The ocean is a defining feature of our planet and crucial to life on Earth, yet it remains one of the planet’s last unexplored frontiers. For this reason, WHOI scientists and engineers are committed to understanding all facets of the ocean as well as its complex connections with Earth’s atmosphere, land, ice, seafloor, and life—including humanity. This is essential not only to advance knowledge about our planet, but also to ensure society’s long-term welfare and to help guide human stewardship of the environment. WHOI researchers are also dedicated to training future generations of ocean science leaders, to providing unbiased information that informs public policy and decision-making, and to expanding public awareness about the importance of the global ocean and its resources.

    The Institution is organized into six departments, the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Ocean Research, and a marine policy center. Its shore-based facilities are located in the village of Woods Hole, Massachusetts and a mile and a half away on the Quissett Campus. The bulk of the Institution’s funding comes from grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation and other government agencies, augmented by foundations and private donations.

    WHOI scientists, engineers, and students collaborate to develop theories, test ideas, build seagoing instruments, and collect data in diverse marine environments. Ships operated by WHOI carry research scientists throughout the world’s oceans. The WHOI fleet includes two large research vessels (R/V Atlantis and R/V Neil Armstrong); the coastal craft Tioga; small research craft such as the dive-operation work boat Echo; the deep-diving human-occupied submersible Alvin; the tethered, remotely operated vehicle Jason/Medea; and autonomous underwater vehicles such as the REMUS and SeaBED.

    WHOI offers graduate and post-doctoral studies in marine science. There are several fellowship and training programs, and graduate degrees are awarded through a joint program with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. WHOI is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges . WHOI also offers public outreach programs and informal education through its Exhibit Center and summer tours. The Institution has a volunteer program and a membership program, WHOI Associate.

    On October 1, 2020, Peter B. de Menocal became the institution’s eleventh president and director.

    History

    In 1927, a National Academy of Sciences committee concluded that it was time to “consider the share of the United States of America in a worldwide program of oceanographic research.” The committee’s recommendation for establishing a permanent independent research laboratory on the East Coast to “prosecute oceanography in all its branches” led to the founding in 1930 of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

    A $2.5 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation supported the summer work of a dozen scientists, construction of a laboratory building and commissioning of a research vessel, the 142-foot (43 m) ketch R/V Atlantis, whose profile still forms the Institution’s logo.

    WHOI grew substantially to support significant defense-related research during World War II, and later began a steady growth in staff, research fleet, and scientific stature. From 1950 to 1956, the director was Dr. Edward “Iceberg” Smith, an Arctic explorer, oceanographer and retired Coast Guard rear admiral.

    In 1977 the institution appointed the influential oceanographer John Steele as director, and he served until his retirement in 1989.

    On 1 September 1985, a joint French-American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution identified the location of the wreck of the RMS Titanic which sank off the coast of Newfoundland 15 April 1912.

    On 3 April 2011, within a week of resuming of the search operation for Air France Flight 447, a team led by WHOI, operating full ocean depth autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) owned by the Waitt Institute discovered, by means of sidescan sonar, a large portion of debris field from flight AF447.

    In March 2017 the institution effected an open-access policy to make its research publicly accessible online.

    The Institution has maintained a long and controversial business collaboration with the treasure hunter company Odyssey Marine. Likewise, WHOI has participated in the location of the San José galleon in Colombia for the commercial exploitation of the shipwreck by the Government of President Santos and a private company.

    In 2019, iDefense reported that China’s hackers had launched cyberattacks on dozens of academic institutions in an attempt to gain information on technology being developed for the United States Navy. Some of the targets included the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The attacks have been underway since at least April 2017.

     
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