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Chesapeake Bay’s Underwater Plants Stage Record-Breaking Comeback, Thanks to Nutrient Diet

Monday, March 5th, 2018

by Kristen Minogue

Research on boat above seagrass

A scientist tests water quality and seagrass biomass on the Susquehanna Flats, in upper Chesapeake Bay. (Cassie Gurbisz)

For a long time, it seemed the odds were never in their favor. With seagrass wasting disease, hurricanes and chronic pollution, tens of thousands of acres of Chesapeake Bay underwater plants vanished between the 1950s and 1970s, marking the largest decline in over four centuries. But now, thanks to concerted efforts to rein in harmful nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, underwater flora can celebrate a new victory: the largest underwater grass resurgence ever recorded.

A team of 14 Chesapeake scientists came out with the discovery on Monday, in a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The scientists found that since 1984, average nitrogen levels in the Bay have dropped 23 percent, and phosphorus has dropped 8 percent. As a result, underwater plants in Chesapeake Bay have shot up more than four-fold. Click to continue »

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The Ocean Is Losing Its Breath. Here’s the Global Scope.

Thursday, January 4th, 2018

by Kristen Minogue

Dead corals and crab shells

Low oxygen caused the death of these corals and others in Bocas del Toro, Panama. The dead crabs pictured also succumbed to the loss of dissolved oxygen.
(Credit: Arcadio Castillo/Smithsonian)

In the past 50 years, the amount of water in the open ocean with zero oxygen has gone up more than fourfold. In coastal water bodies, including estuaries and seas, low-oxygen sites have increased more than 10-fold since 1950. Scientists expect oxygen to continue dropping even outside these zones as Earth warms. To halt the decline, the world needs to rein in both climate change and nutrient pollution, an international team of scientists asserted in a new paper published Jan. 4 in Science.

“Oxygen is fundamental to life in the oceans,” said Denise Breitburg, lead author and marine ecologist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. “The decline in ocean oxygen ranks among the most serious effects of human activities on the Earth’s environment.”

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In San Francisco, One Wet Winter Can Switch Up Bay’s Invasive Species

Thursday, December 7th, 2017

Winter rains make Bay less salty, knocking back some invaders

by Kristen Minogue

Man in sunglasses on rocky beach

Marine ecologist Andrew Chang tracks invasive species in California, and is discovering ways climate change and extreme weather can alter the playing field. (Credit: Julia Blum)

For many Californians, last year’s wet winter triggered a case of whiplash. After five years of drought, rain from October 2016 to February 2017 broke more than a century of records thanks to a series of “Pineapple Express” storms, referring to atmospheric rivers that ferry moisture from Hawaii to the Pacific Coast. In San Francisco Bay, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center biologists discovered a hidden side effect: All that freshwater rain can turn the tables on some of the bay’s invasive species.

“As you get wetter and wetter, there are fewer and fewer [marine] species that can tolerate those conditions,” said Andrew Chang, lead author of the new study published Dec. 7 in Global Change Biology.

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Manmade Docks Offer Surprising Refuge for Endangered Fish

Friday, October 20th, 2017

Biologists discover endangered Isthmian goby and other elusive fish thriving around dock pilings

by Kristen Minogue

Isthmian goby and black grouper

Top: Endangered Isthmian goby (Gobiosoma spilotum) found beneath a dock of Bocas del Toro, Panama. Bottom: Threatened black grouper (Mycoptera bonaci) found beneath a Belize dock. Photos: Simon Brandl & Jordan Casey/Smithsonian

The Panama Canal is home to one of the rarest fish in the world: the Isthmian goby, an endangered, brown-speckled fish less than 3 centimeters long. For years scientists thought it remained only at the locks of the canal’s Caribbean entrance, until a team of Smithsonian biologists found one nearly 200 miles away in a place no one expected.

Isthmian gobies (Gobiosoma spilotum) thrive in shallow waters like tropical tidepools. The expansion of the Panama Canal, along with other coastal development, has eaten up much of their habitat. So scientists were shocked to find the goby circling another manmade structure, a dock off the Panamanian island of Bocas del Toro. The team, from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) and the National Museum of Natural History, reported their discovery in a new study in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

“I didn’t even know what it was at first,” said Simon Brandl, the study’s lead author and SERC biologist. Though he knew it was a goby of some kind, he was unable to pinpoint the species. So Brandl sent the mystery photo to scientists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and the American Museum of Natural History. “They were like, holy cow, this is Gobiosoma spilotum.” Click to continue »

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Following the Movement of Life: Tagging Sharks and Rays

Thursday, October 12th, 2017

by Cosette Larash and Claire Mueller

For the last three years, a team of biologists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center has been tracking stingrays, sharks and other species along the East coast of the United States. Matt Ogburn and Charles Bangley are leading the project, in an effort to learn more about these charismatic yet often misunderstood animals. It’s part of the Movement of Life Initiative, a developing program in animal tracking research conducted by Smithsonian Institution researchers and their colleagues.

Ogburn and Bangley are focusing on five species: Cownose Rays and four major species of sharks (Bull Sharks, Blacktip Sharks, Dusky Sharks, and Smooth Dogfish). They began tagging cownose rays in 2014, and added on sharks in 2016. By understanding the movement patterns of these animals, the Smithsonian biologists and their colleagues hope to unlock some of the mystery that surrounds them. For example, scientists know Cownose Rays are born in the Chesapeake Bay and return when they’re about four years old, but no one knows where they go in the meantime. The sharks they are studying all occupy similar areas, but use underwater habitats differently. By learning how and where these organisms move, they can understand their environment as well.

In the future, the scientists hope to use the data to uncover when and why these species occupy different areas, and determine the potential impact of human activities such as fisheries and offshore wind farms. Check out the videos above and below to learn more about these projects.

Learn more about the Smithsonian’s Movement of Life Initiative

Learn more about Ogburn and Bangley’s Movement of Life work tracking aquatic migrations

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Tsunami Enabled Hundreds of Species to Raft Across Pacific

Thursday, September 28th, 2017

Biologists Detect Longest Transoceanic Rafting Voyage for Coastal Species

by Kristen Minogue

Barnacle-coated boat with Japanese characters washed up on beach

A Japanese tsunami vessel washed ashore in Oregon, coated in gooseneck barnacles. In a new study, scientists detected 289 species that rafted from Japan to the U.S. on tsunami debris, and they suspect many more were undetected. (Credit: John Chapman)

The 2011 Japanese tsunami set the stage for something unprecedented. For the first time in recorded history, scientists have detected entire communities of coastal species crossing the ocean by floating on makeshift rafts. Nearly 300 species have appeared on the shores of Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast attached to tsunami debris, marine biologists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Williams College and other institutions reported in the journal Science on Thursday.

The tsunami formed March 11, 2011, triggered by an earthquake of 9.0 moment magnitude that struck Japan the same day. When it reached the shore, the tsunami towered 125 feet (38.38 meters) over Japan’s Tōhoku coast and swept millions of objects out to sea, from small pieces of plastic to fishing boats and docks. These kinds of objects, scientists said, helped the species attached to them complete the transoceanic journey.

“I didn’t think that most of these coastal organisms could survive at sea for long periods of time,” said Greg Ruiz, a co-author and marine biologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. “But in many ways they just haven’t had much opportunity in the past. Now, plastic can combine with tsunami and storm events to create that opportunity on a large scale.”

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Biodiversity just as powerful as climate change for healthy ecosystems

Wednesday, September 6th, 2017

In the wild, diversity determines ecosystem production as much as climate and nutrients

by Kristen Minogue

Yellow fish swimming around coral reef

A school of grunts explores a shallow reef at Carrie Bow Cay, Belize, one of Smithsonian MarineGEO’s long-term research sites. Biodiversity not only can make sites beautiful, but also can help boost their biomass and make them more productive. (Credit: Ross Whippo/SERC).

Biodiversity is proving to be one of humanity’s best defenses against extreme weather and rising temperatures. In past experiments, diversity has fostered healthier, more productive ecosystems, like shoreline vegetation that guards against hurricanes. However, many experts doubted whether these experiments would hold up in the real world. A Smithsonian and University of Michigan study published in this week’s issue of Nature offers a decisive answer: Biodiversity’s power in the wild does not match that predicted by experiments—it surpasses it, in some cases topping even the effects of climate.

“Biodiversity is not just a pretty face,” said Emmett Duffy, lead author and marine ecologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md. “Protecting it is important for keeping the ecosystems working for us, providing food, absorbing waste and protecting shorelines, which is important right now.”

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Want Biodiversity? Love Your Enemies…Sometimes

Tuesday, August 1st, 2017

by Kristen Minogue

Three separate images of leaf infected by anthracnose, acorn with an insect hole and emerald ash borer.

Signs of three temperate forest enemies, left to right: Anthracnose (SERC), insect hole in an acorn (Jonathan Myers), emerald ash borer (Leah Bauer, USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station, Bugwood.org)

Walk through a forest in Maryland or Missouri, and you’ll probably find yourself surrounded by dozens of different tree species. Walk through a tropical forest in Brazil or Malaysia, and you’ll be surrounded by hundreds—in some forests, over 1,000. What’s behind this colossal difference in diversity? Scientists with the Smithsonian-led ForestGEO network came up with one morbid possibility: It may come down to having the right kind of enemy.

Earlier this summer, in a study in Science, researchers from 24 plots in the forest network from five continents pooled their data and detected a strange pattern: There’s a force at work in the tropics helping rare species thrive, a force that is much weaker in the cooler temperate zone.

Call it a clustering effect. The scientific term is “conspecific negative density dependence,” but it boils down to this: If too many trees of the same species grow in the same spot, they become magnets for enemies that slash their populations. In tropical forests, enemies generally knock them down just enough for new species to fill the gaps, without completely wiping out the first species. The result is a kaleidoscope forest with hundreds of species, many quite rare.

It may seem like a counterintuitive idea, that a lethal enemy could help sustain biodiversity. It can work when this thinning process prevents any one species from dominating.

“Just when a population is ready to take over, it catches a cold,” explained Sean McMahon, a co-author and forest ecologist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). “And so it gets knocked back.”

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Scientists Turn Up the Heat on Herbivores and Their Food

Friday, July 28th, 2017

By Joe Dawson, science writing intern

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Japanese beetles make a meal of evening primrose leaves (Credit: Dejeanne Doublet/SERC)

Plants can seem pretty boring. They just sit there, after all. Sure, they can be pretty; they can make us sneeze. But what else do they do? A lot, it turns out. They are able to shift their own water and energy resources from leaves to stems to roots and back, grow tall or stay low and bushy, defend themselves through biological warfare, or warn their neighbors of danger. When doors get blocked, plants have ingenious ways of sneaking out through windows.

What, then, will plants do when humans spread a carbon dioxide blanket over the planet, warming it by burning fossil fuels? Research scientist Nate Lemoine of Colorado State University, with John Parker of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) and others, decided to investigate one such relationship with an experiment on the SERC campus in 2013 and 2014. Click to continue »

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Time Travel, with Trees

Monday, July 10th, 2017

by Joe Dawson, science writing intern

Looking at the Kirkpatrick Marsh on the Rhode River, a time machine is not the first thing that comes to mind. Tall grasses dominate the landscape, with vertical PVC pipes popping up here and there and octagon-shaped chambers rising out of the wetland every ten paces or so. Take a step off the walkway, and you might lose a shoe. But five experiments on the marsh are designed to take sections of the marsh into the 22nd Century, and the marsh has been dubbed the Global Change Research Wetland, or GCReW. The expertise that GCReW scientists have in simulating the future brought National Museum of Natural History scientists here to mirror the past.

Rich Barclay and Scott Wing are paleobotanists at the National Museum of Natural History. Paleobotanists are the ones who stare at leaves in Jurassic Park and say, “Alan, these plants haven’t been seen since the Cretaceous Period,” as everyone else stares at brachiosauruses. Ancient plants are their bread and butter, and for Wing and Barclay, the bread is toasted and the butter melty. They study one of the warmest periods in the last 100 million years, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). During this period, global temperatures skyrocketed, increasing by 10-15 degrees Fahrenheit. By looking at plants that grew during this time, they hope to learn more about what Earth was like 55 million years ago.

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Large growth chambers being built around newly-planted ginkgo trees on the SERC campus (Credit: Rich Barclay)

Barclay, Wing, and colleagues have started another experiment on the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s (SERC) campus, in a forest a few miles down the road from the GCREW marsh. The project grows ginkgo trees in varying carbon dioxide levels. They hope to study these trees and compare them to fossil specimens to learn about the past. Click to continue »

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