Ecology

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Making Noise About Marine Sound Pollution

Thursday, August 4th, 2016

SERC intern Michelle Hauer sets up her soundscape ecology tank experiment (Photo: Emily Li/SERC)

by Emily Li

In high school, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center intern Michelle Hauer fell in love with sound. She discovered the cello, which she insisted on bringing to her internship this summer despite having limited space and housing. But her affair with sound didn’t stop there, even as she was exploring her interest in science. While still in high school, she wrote a paper on the effects of naval sonar on marine mammals. Then, while attending DePaul University, Hauer came across the relatively new field of soundscape ecology through a Chicago-based organization called Chicago Wildsounds—and she hasn’t looked back. Now, as a summer intern in SERC’s Fish and Invertebrate Ecology Lab, Hauer is studying the darker side of sound by researching how noise pollution can affect marine wildlife in the Chesapeake Bay and beyond.

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An Acid Test for the Coasts

Monday, August 1st, 2016

SERC intern Jasmin Graham cleans her equipment of marine organisms (Photo: Emily Li/SERC)

by Emily Li

Watching educational programs like Animal Planet or That’s My Baby—a series that documents pregnant animals—might evoke memories of flickering classroom projectors for most. But for Jasmin Graham, an intern with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), these shows were her childhood. Her love for marine science and wildlife followed her through high school science fairs and university research on shark genetics at the College of Charleston. Now, at an internship with SERC’s Ocean Acidification Lab, she studies acidification not in the open ocean, but in a far more dramatic arena, where the marine celebrities she grew up with may be at risk.

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Posted in Climate Change, Ecology, Extreme Weather, Fisheries, From the Field, Interns, Interviews, SERC Sites and Scenes, Water Quality | 1 Response »

How Clay Caterpillars Help Unlock Biodiversity’s Secrets

Friday, July 22nd, 2016

by Emily Li

Anna Nordseth surveys clay caterpillars for damage in BiodiversiTREE plot — _{Anna Nordseth surveys clay caterpillars for predation damage in BiodiversiTREE plot (Credit: Emily Li/SERC)}

Anna Nordseth, a summer intern for the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s Terrestrial Ecology Lab, wasn’t surprised to be taking work home the first week and a half of her internship. What she wasn’t expecting was to be making nearly a thousand clay caterpillars.

Each caterpillar began life as a half gram of green clay, with a wire spine and ends rolled into a worm-like silhouette. By the time Nordseth had finished—several podcasts and three seasons of House of Cards later—she had 900 caterpillars and the hand cramps to prove it. But she was ready to begin her research.

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Q&A: Preparing a Safety Net for Native Plants

Monday, July 18th, 2016

Tony Dove in the garden pond in front of the SERC Administration Building. (Photo: Emily Li/SERC)

by Emily Li

What do we do when native plants lose? About five years ago, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and the U.S. Department of Agriculture joined forces to back up seed sources of native plant species, just in case something threatens to wipe them out—but for some species, it looks like we might need them sooner rather than later. Learn more about the partnership and the pros of gardening with natives in this edited Q&A with Smithsonian Environmental Research Center horticulturalist Tony Dove.

Can you tell me about the native sentinel plant species partnership between SERC and the Department of Agriculture?

The Department of Agriculture has a woody plant germplasm conservation center in Beltsville. And what they do is they go around to different locations throughout the country and they collect seeds of various native plants. They grow those native plants in a nursery with the expectation that they will then take those plants and put them out into landscapes in different areas, so that there will always be a seed source for those particular plants if something tragically happens in the area where those plants grew.

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Invasive Ascidians Are a (Potentially Delicious) Recipe for Disaster

Thursday, July 14th, 2016

Christina Simkanin prepares to dive into a marina to survey for ascidians

Christina Simkanin prepares to dive to survey ascidians. (Credit: Natalia Filip, University of Victoria, BC, Canada)

by Emily Li

Smithsonian biologists are on the trail of invasive ascidians. But with roughly 2300 species worldwide, describing these marine filter feeders (also known as “tunicates” or “sea squirts”) for a Most Wanted sign is tricky. Some ascidians are solitary; some are social. Some breed sexually, some asexually. Some, like Botrylloides magnicoecum, form large colonies of what look like octopus tentacles ringed in gold and highlighter blue. Others, like Rhopalaea crassa, resemble a cross between ghostly butterfly cocoons and pastel-colored pencil grips, while Polycarpa aurata is bulbous and mustard-yellow, with navy-blue veins that flare into trumpets.

When they invade new territory, ascidians can leave trails of damage in their wakes—but not always in ways scientists predict. In a new study published in the July issue of Marine Biology, a team of Smithsonian researchers, including marine ecologist Christina Simkanin of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), tracked their invasions across North America.

What they found seemed simple at first: North America’s 26 non-native ascidian species have spread so much they’re now established along nearly 3000 miles of its coastlines. But a few surprises were hiding in the details.

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Climate Change Could Release Ancient Soil Carbon

Friday, July 1st, 2016

by Kristen Minogue

Blanca Bernal extracts a soil core from a SERC marsh. (Credit: SERC)

Just beneath our feet, there’s a slumbering pool of carbon that has largely been ignored.

Earth’s deep soils store vast reservoirs of carbon centuries to millennia old. Left undisturbed, they can store that carbon for thousands of years longer. But if triggered, those reservoirs could release carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere, a team of scientists discovered in a new study from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.

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Cranking Up the Heat in the ‘Wetland of the Future’

Friday, June 24th, 2016

by Joe Dawson, SERC research aide

Last fall, while volunteering in a plant lab at George Washington University in D.C., I heard about an experiment that was starting up at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). The project, a global warming simulation in the wetlands surrounding the Chesapeake Bay, was helmed by SERC research ecologist Roy Rich, an ecologist with an engineer’s mindset. I’ve been a wetlands enthusiast since I spotted my first blue Heron as a kid, and global climate change is, in my mind, the most pressing issue humans face today. I was ready to sign up. I met with Roy and asked the same questions I have since answered over and over again since joining the project in November:

Joe Dawson kneels by a control box on marsh

Joe Dawson checks a control box for the underground heating cables that help raise temperature in the marsh plots. (Kristen Minogue/SERC)

“You’re heating up a swamp?” Yes.

“And adding CO₂?” Yes.

“In a greenhouse?” No.

“Out in the open?” Yes.

“Umm, how?” Well…

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Geckos and Lemurs and… What? Celebrating Unexpected Pollinators

Monday, June 20th, 2016

by Emily Li

We have a lot to thank pollinators for this National Pollinator Week. Not only do they provide every third bite of food, but they also add $217 billion dollars to the global economy and help support healthy ecosystems. But can we even identify a pollinator when we see one?

Picture pollinators—from fat, sunlit bumblebees hovering lazily from flower to flower, to yellow butterflies flitting among pollen-dusted petals in brilliant flashes of antennae and wing. If you’re feeling especially imaginative, you might think of the delicate, curved beaks of hummingbirds dipped into blossoms larger than themselves. But while bees and butterflies share the limelight, underappreciated pollinators from all walks, wings, and wades of life quietly help to create the next generation of flowering plants.

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Key to Oysters’ Future Lies in Past

Monday, May 23rd, 2016

Typical American Indian oyster deposit, roughly 1,000 years old. (Torben Rick/Smithsonian)

by John Gibbons

Oysters have provided food for humans for millennia, and play an enormous role in sustaining estuaries around the world. Yet after more than a century of overfishing, pollution, disease and habitat degradation, oyster populations in the Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere have suffered dramatic declines. But for thousands of years,American Indians in the region harvested the shellfish from the Bay sustainably—a discovery published Monday that could offer clues for future oyster restoration.

Little is known about oyster populations prior to the late 1800s. On May 23 a team of Smithsonian scientists and other researchers published the first bay-wide, millennial-scale study of oyster harvesting in the Chesapeake in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using fossil, archaeological, and modern biological data, the team was able to reconstruct changes in oyster size from four timeframes: the Pleistocene (780,000-13,000 years ago), prehistoric American Indian occupation (3,200 – 400 years ago), historic (400 – 50 years ago) and modern times (2000 to 2014).

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Posted in Archaeology, Ecology, Fisheries, Publications | Comments Off on Key to Oysters’ Future Lies in Past

Biodiversity Protects Fish From Climate Change

Monday, May 16th, 2016

by Kristen Minogue

Fish provide protein to billions of people and are an especially critical food source in the developing world. Today, marine biologists confirmed a key factor that could help them thrive through the coming decades: biodiversity. Communities with more fish species are more productive and more resilient to rising temperatures and temperature swings, according to a new study from the Smithsonian’s Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network and other international institutions.

The accelerating loss and rearrangement of species all over the globe have troubled scientists and the public for decades. But the question of whether biodiversity offers practical value—for humans and ecosystems—remained controversial. The new study, published May 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers the most thorough proof yet that preserving marine biodiversity can benefit people as much as it benefits the oceans.

“Biodiversity is more than a pretty face,” said lead author Emmett Duffy, director of the Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network and senior scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. “Preserving biodiversity is not just an aesthetic or spiritual issue—it’s critical to the healthy functioning of ecosystems and the important services they provide to humans, like seafood.”

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Shorelines

Life and science at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

Ecology

...now browsing by category

Making Noise About Marine Sound Pollution

An Acid Test for the Coasts

How Clay Caterpillars Help Unlock Biodiversity’s Secrets

Q&A: Preparing a Safety Net for Native Plants

Invasive Ascidians Are a (Potentially Delicious) Recipe for Disaster

Climate Change Could Release Ancient Soil Carbon

Cranking Up the Heat in the ‘Wetland of the Future’

Geckos and Lemurs and… What? Celebrating Unexpected Pollinators

Key to Oysters’ Future Lies in Past

Biodiversity Protects Fish From Climate Change