A big shout-out to Megan, Rainer, and Liz who apart from their intrepid work as volunteers in our lab also excelled here in their video project for MARN3000. They interviewed Profs. Kelly Lombardo, Michael Finiguerra, and Hannes Baumann about aspects of Marine Climate Change and then cut their answers with researched video material from the web. Note the sartorial touch throughout the clip (6 min)!
Well done, all!
The information material below contains graphical summaries of our activities, i.e., measuring water quality parameters continuously with a logging probe and conducting biweekly beach seine surveys for silversides.
To a productive year 2016 in the cove!
In preparation for the upcoming Feng Graduate Research Colloquium on Thursday, May 12 (Conn Avery Point, Marine Sciences), Hannes gave a brown bag seminar on how to make an effective presentation.
You can access/download the powerpoint of via this link below or by clicking on the image below.
On 15 March, Hannes gave a lecture at Mitchell College in New London, talking about the combined effects of ocean warming, acidification, and hypoxia on marine organisms. The entire lecture is publicly available at Limnology & Oceanography e-lectures.
“It was such a pleasure to have you present to the class today; your lecture was excellent – engaging with just the right amount and level of information. I’m glad that you intend to continue to provide outreach/education to the community on this topic.”
Amy Cabaniss, Adjunct Faculty – Marine Ecology, Environmental Studies (STEM)
On 26 February 2016, H. Baumann was invited to give a seminar at the Biological & Environmental Sciences Colloquium Series at the University of Rhode Island, featuring the recently published e-lecture on “Combined effects of ocean acidification, warming, and deoxygenation on marine organisms”
His host, David Bengston has been a renowned fisheries and aquaculture biologist for the past 40 years.
Baumann, H. (2016)
Combined effects of ocean acidification, warming, and hypoxia on marine organisms.
Limnology and Oceanography e-Lectures 6:1-43
Thanks to Jake’s new GoPro, here’s a time lapse of all of us working for hours to sample, measure and preserve various parts of the populations for later analyses of weight, sex, as well as genetic and transcriptomic approaches.
Originally posted on UConn Today, by Tim Miller
Over the next two centuries, climate change is likely to impact everything from industrial agriculture to the shape of our coastlines. The changing climate will certainly cause huge changes around the world, and the challenge is to predict exactly what impact those changes will have.
In the world of marine science, this means grappling with a process called ocean acidification. As human activity pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, some of the carbon dioxide gets absorbed into the sea, which raises its acidity.
Scientists have been concerned about this for more than a decade, says Hannes Baumann, an assistant professor of marine sciences who studies the phenomenon in his lab at UConn’s Avery Point campus. “The fundamental question,” he says, “is whether or not organisms can adapt to this threat.”
That question is important, because although ocean acidification is happening, it is a slow process. Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have increased more than 50 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. They are expected to undergo another four-fold increase, but over the course of the next 300 years.
“Three hundred years is only five or six generations for whales or long-lived sharks,” says Baumann, “or 300,000 generations of single-celled organisms.”
Recent work has thus focused on whether or not species can evolve along with the ocean, adapting over time to the increasing acidity.
Measuring evolutionary potential
In order to answer that question, Baumann and his colleagues turned to a small but important fish, the Atlantic silverside, Menidia menidia. Common across the shallow waters of eastern North America, the silverside is an important food source for aquatic birds like egret and cormorant, as well as commercially important fish species like bluefish and striped bass.
The researchers’ goal was to measure the so-called “evolutionary potential” of this species. It was already known that high levels of carbon dioxide would kill many, but not all, Atlantic silverside larvae. The researchers wanted to know whether the likelihood of surviving had a genetic component: if fish that were related to one another were more or less likely to survive in the new environment.
“We were basically trying to answer the question: Can they evolve?” Baumann says.
His team approached the problem by capturing wild silverside from a beach in Long Island Sound, and raising several groups of their offspring in the lab, some under normal ocean conditions, and some in a more acidic environment.
They then tracked how long each of the fish lived, and analyzed their DNA, looking for what are called “microsatellites” – the same repetitive strands of DNA that are used in human paternity tests. The analysis revealed which fish were related to one another.
The team found that related fish had similar lifespans, suggesting that there is indeed a significant genetic component to survival in an acidic ocean. This means that the fish does have the potential to evolve, a finding which may have important ramifications for predictions about how the ocean environment will change with the changing climate.
Baumann, who recently joined the faculty at UConn after an appointment at Stony Brook University, was enthusiastic about the result, primarily because it demonstrates a method by which the evolutionary potential of other species can be measured.
“This is an experiment that can be performed in one generation,” he says. He is hopeful that the results will prove useful in predicting how oysters, sea urchins, and a host of other marine organisms will be able to cope with the changing ocean environment.
The research was first published Feb. 14 online, and will appear in the March issue of the journal Evolutionary Applications.
This work was made possible by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Web coverage: UConn Today | NSF | OceanBites | ScienceDaily | AAAS EurekAlert | EnvResearchWeb | Phys.org | ScienceWR
Our work analyzing and combining USGS high frequency monitoring data from a temperate tidal salt marsh (Flax Pond, NY) was featured in the October USGS newsletter.