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Ecology

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Dormant Orchids Need Fungi to Rise Again

Friday, January 6th, 2017

by Kristen Minogue

Green small whorled pogonia plant with flower

Small-whorled pogonia orchid, Isotria medeoloides.
(Melissa McCormick/SERC)

If you are a plant, when life aboveground turns harsh, you have few options. Some orchids respond by going dormant, spending years to decades underground before reemerging aboveground. But an army of the right fungi may help jolt them out of dormancy, ecologists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) discovered in a new study published in the American Journal of Botany Friday.

Smithsonian scientists have been working to understand the ecology of one particular orchid – including why it enters and exits dormancy. The small-whorled pogonia is widely regarded as the rarest orchid east of the Mississippi. Federally listed as threatened, the orchid has vanished from Maryland and is endangered in 16 other states.

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Posted in Ecology, Publications | 2 Responses »

Jekyll or Hyde? The Many Faces of Phragmites

Friday, December 16th, 2016

by Kristen Minogue

Scientist beside a Phragmites experiment on the water.

Pat Megonigal studies the invasive reed Phragmites australis on the Smithsonian’s Global Change Research Wetland.
(Tom Mozdzer)

It’s easy to dislike Phragmites. The invasive brown reed can grow over 15 feet tall and tends to crowd out anything in its shadow. But in the story of global change, Phragmites is a gray character, like Mad Men’s Don Draper, or the enigmatic Professor Snape. Beneath the surface, Phragmites australis—a European reed sweeping over East Coast wetlands—can empower wetlands to grow higher soils and possibly survive rising seas. Biogeochemist Pat Megonigal of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) prefers an analogy from classic literature: Jekyll and Hyde.

“The Jekyll part is that Phragmites helps marshes maintain elevation and keep pace with sea level rise,” he said. “The Hyde part is that they are poor habitat for native plants and animals.”

The latest discovery in Megonigal’s lab could tip things in favor of Mr. Hyde. Phragmites’ deep-growing roots were once thought an advantage that helps wetlands build soil. But those same roots could be disturbing ancient soils deep underground—triggering them to release planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2).

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A Diverse Portfolio is Good for Oysters Too

Friday, December 2nd, 2016

by Kristen Minogue

Olympia oysters underwater
Olympia oysters (Matthew Gray/Oregon State University)

Act local. Diversity pays. Those two phrases could hold the key to saving young Olympia oysters, the only native oysters on the West Coast of North America. What they need are large networks of adult oyster beds to settle on—and a diverse “environmental portfolio,” finds a new study in Ecology.

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River Herring Have Better Shot at Comeback, Thanks to Underwater Sound

Wednesday, November 30th, 2016

by Kristen Minogue

For decades, efforts to conserve Chesapeake river herring have run into a black hole of uncertainty. Managers knew populations had plummeted, but no one knew how many remained. A team of biologists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center has found a way forward, recording the first complete spawning run of river herring in the Choptank River since the 1970s.

Their findings, published Tuesday in Transactions of the American Fisheries Society, give conservationists and managers a starting point: 1.3 million adult river herring migrating up the Choptank in one season.

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Time Lords and Ladies of History’s Trash

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2016

by Emily Li

Digging through soil plot

Citizen scientist Linda Perkins helps excavate a soil plot in front of the Contee mansion ruins. (Photo: SERC)

People don’t usually think of archaeologists as dumpster divers. Then again, sifting through trash for hidden treasures is exactly what the volunteer citizen scientists of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) Archaeology Lab do every Wednesday. But they don’t scavenge anything for themselves. (The market for millenia-old oyster shells is very unpredictable, and any food they find is always up to three centuries past its expiration date.) Instead, they take away new skills and a chance to put together a historical puzzle larger than themselves.

“We look back thousands of years,” said Jim Gibb, the lead volunteer and coordinator of the lab. “I always tell people—we’re the time lords.”  Click to continue »

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Westward, Ho! MarineGEO Enters The Pacific

Wednesday, November 16th, 2016

by Kristen Minogue

Hakai scientists selfie on boat

Margot Hessing-Lewis and the Nearshore Tech Team of the Hakai Institute, British Columbia, one of the newest MarineGEO sites on the Pacific. (Photo: Margot Hessing-Lewis,  Hakai Insititute)

Imagine gazing into the ocean off Maryland knowing what life is under the waves, what’s driving the food web, and how healthy the water is. Then, imagine being able to discover the same thing for another coast halfway around the world. That vision—of a network vast enough to take the pulse of coastal waters worldwide—began becoming a reality at the Smithsonian in 2012. It’s called the Marine Global Earth Observatory, or MarineGEO.

Back in 2012, it had only four sites, known as the “Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network” after Michael and Suzanne Tennenbaum, whose donation jumpstarted the network. Those original four were all on the Atlantic: The Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Chesapeake Bay, the Smithsonian Marine Station in Florida, Carrie Bow Cay in Belize, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Today, MarineGEO has nine sites, with three on the Pacific and memoranda of understanding for sites at Texas A&M University and the University of Hong Kong. And there is one more Pacific site still to come.

“The MarineGEO aspiration has always been to extend around the world … The ocean is connected everywhere,” said Emmett Duffy, MarineGEO’s director based out of SERC. Click to continue »

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Jawshank Redemption: Understanding shark behavior through science

Wednesday, October 26th, 2016

by Heather Soulen

Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the movie Jaws, regarded by many as “the movie that changed Hollywood.” While true, Jaws shaped more than just Hollywood. With its ominous, adrenaline pumping two-note score and imagery of a bloodthirsty, torpedo-shaped predator with rows of razor-sharp teeth, Spielberg’s film shaped our perception of sharks.

Tagged juvenile bull shark

The team’s first tagged juvenile bull shark (Photo credit: Kim Richie)

After Jaws, fear of the unknown arrested us, and our lack of knowledge helped demonize sharks. But the winds are shifting. New research initiated by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s Fish and Invertebrate Ecology Lab aims to investigate habitat use, migration patterns, and species interactions of four underrepresented shark species found in the Chesapeake Bay and along the Atlantic Coast.

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Q&A: Saving the City With Urban Ecology

Thursday, October 20th, 2016

by Kristen Minogue

Painting of adults and children on a brick wall in Baltimore.

Community mural in a Baltimore neighborhood. (BES-LTER)

Preserving the environment is often seen as a battle of development versus nature. But in America today, roughly three-fourths of us live in metropolitan areas. To preserve our health and the planet’s health, we need to create something new: A sustainable city.

Enter urban ecology. Plant ecologist Steward Pickett of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies has been exploring the ecology of cities—hot spots where society, culture, economics and the environment collide—for more than two decades. In 1997, he and a handful of colleagues started the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, a long-term project that now involves more than 100 people. Pickett talks about some of their surprising discoveries in this edited Q&A.  To learn more, you can meet him in person on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s keynote evening lecture.

*Note: Edited for brevity and clarity

Steward Pickett with camera

Steward Pickett (Xiaofang Hu)

How strange was the idea of “urban ecology” when you began?

It was sort of a marginal pursuit. Most ecologists in the United States preferred to think they were working in pristine areas, or at least in areas where the human hand was relatively light on the land… There was this deep, deep bias in ecology to not look at places where people were part of the system … Urban ecology is kind of a way to say, let’s recognize this and see what it’s doing.  Click to continue »

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DNA Unlocks Dirty Secrets of Blue Catfish Diets

Wednesday, October 12th, 2016

by Kristen Minogue

Large blue catfish held on boat by scientist.

Blue catfish SERC biologists dubbed “Megalodon,”  which they tracked moving almost 60 miles along the Patuxent River. (Brooke Weigel/SERC)

White perch, menhaden and darters: These are just a few favorite foods of Maryland’s invasive blue catfish, according to a new study from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). They’re also known to gorge themselves on larvae of channel catfish—and, occasionally, juveniles of their own kind.

The study, published in the journal Environmental Biology of Fishes, used DNA barcoding to get to the gut of what blue catfish prey on. Blue catfish arrived in Chesapeake Bay in the 1960s, brought by Virginia managers to establish a fishery. They quickly developed a reputation as voracious predators, threatening to devour many popular fisheries and edge out the Chesapeake’s native white catfish. However, to discover how much they could disrupt the ecosystem, marine biologists need to know exactly what they eat. The only way to do that is to look into their stomachs, where the majority of their prey has been reduced to almost-unrecognizable slop.

Rob Aguilar would know: A biologist with SERC’s Fish and Invertebrate Lab, he’s spent the last few years dissecting blue catfish stomachs and analyzing their insides. Click to continue »

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When the Going Gets Tough, Baby Oysters Get Growing

Friday, September 23rd, 2016

by Kristen Minogue

Andrew Keppel

Andrew Keppel (Credit: Rebecca Burrell/SERC)

Baby oysters are a lot stronger than they look. Living mainly in shallow coastal waters, where oxygen plummets and acidity spikes on a nightly basis, building a decent shell should be a challenge. But after a couple of weeks, young oysters are often able to adjust to the harsh conditions—and, sometimes, even grow more quickly to make up for lost time.

The discovery came from a team of marine ecologists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), who published the new study in the journal PLOS ONE.

“It’s really impressive what these oysters are able to do in terms of acclimating to potentially harmful conditions,” said lead author Andrew Keppel, who worked on the project as a graduate student and later technician in SERC’s Marine Ecology Lab, before becoming an oceanography lab manager at the U.S. Naval Academy. Click to continue »

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Posted in Climate Change, Ecology, Fisheries, Publications, Water Quality | 1 Response »

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