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Roughly half of the species living in the San Francisco Bay are newcomers, brought (often unintentionally) by humans. The Bay has been an international shipping hub for over a century, and it’s accumulated biological detritus from around the world. But not everything that’s brought here sticks: It’s something of a mystery why some species proliferate in an alien environment while others die off.
Intern Kenyan Pappe pulls up a fouling panel at a local marina. (Jenny Parr/SERC)
This summer, two interns at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s West Coast branch (SERC-West), investigated how one invader cements itself in the environment during environmental chaos. Jenny Par and Kenyan Pappe looked at the golden star tunicateBotryllus schlosseri, a type of marine invertebrate that often lives around marinas.
by Carmen Ritter, SERC Fish & Invertebrate Ecology Lab intern
Picture that tiny town that one friend always tells you they’re from, with the single post office and the neighbors that know every detail of your personal life. Now picture that, on the water, even smaller. Welcome to Wachapreague, Virginia.
Wachapreague sits on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and claims to be “The Flounder Capital of the World.” The locals are some of the friendliest people you could find, and nearly everyone in the area fishes. I wasn’t there for recreational purposes, though.
This summer, I visited the Virginia Institute of Marine Science Eastern Shore Lab (VIMS ESL) with about 20 scientists from around the country to conduct a bio blitz documenting the biodiversity of Chesapeake Bay. The blitz was organized by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and MarineGEO (the Marine Global Earth Observatory). While most scientists were from the Smithsonian and other research institutions surrounding the Chesapeake Bay, some flew in from Florida, Washington State or Puerto Rico. After gathering for a meeting on the first evening, we all prepared the lab space for samples and headed to bed. The blitz officially started first thing Monday morning.
There’s a war of attrition playing out on the coastlines of the San Francisco Bay that is in a ponderous class of its own. A tiny snail, called a rough periwinkle (Littorina saxatilis), might be pushing its native counterpart, the checkered periwinkle (Littorina scutulata), from the beaches it once called home. But no one is quite sure why, or even how quickly it’s spreading.
Adrielle Cailipan examines a handful of invasive periwinkles. (Philip Kiefer/SERC)
Adrielle Cailipan, a recent graduate of San Francisco State University, is spending her summer internship in the world of periwinkles with the West Coast Lab of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). She’s working not only to document the spread of the rough periwinkle, but also to understand what makes the invader so successful.
In the messy world of science, real progress often happens when experiments don’t go as planned. It’s in these moments that scientists learn that the world doesn’t work like they expected. This year, two teaching fellows at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) had a taste of that during a summer project on oyster predation. Although the data they collected didn’t answer their questions about oysters, it did tell an unexpected story about the coastline. They’re bringing that knowledge back to their classrooms, to show students that science isn’t just about collecting facts, but about how to creatively interrogate the natural world.
This summer, SERC’s West Coast lab hosted two fellows from California’s STEM Teacher and Researcher (STAR) program. The fellowship supports STEM teachers who want to actively pursue science research during the summer in order to bring that experience back to their classrooms.
Evie Borchard and Jason Thomas, teacher-researchers at SERC, stand in front of prime oyster habitat in the San Francisco Bay. (Philip Kiefer/SERC)
“We want to give teachers the opportunity to do research that they can share with their students,” said Erin Blackwood, an education and outreach coordinator at San Francisco State University who organizes the STAR program locally. “At the same time, the program gives our scientists a new perspective on science education–they have to think about how they would teach their research to a high-school student.”
Some invasive plants like Phragmites australis, the light-brown stalks on this Maryland marsh, could more than double the ability of marshes and other coastal ecosystems to store blue carbon. (Credit: Gary Peresta/SERC)
When invasive species enter the picture, things are rarely black and white. A new paper has revealed that some plant invaders could help fight climate change by making it easier for ecosystems to store “blue carbon”—the carbon stored in coastal environments like salt marshes, mangroves and seagrasses. But other invaders, most notably animals, can do the exact opposite.
Alaska has a near-pristine marine ecosystem: There are fewer invasive species in its waters than almost any other state in the U.S. But that could be changing. With help from local volunteers, biologists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) and Temple University have reported a new invasive species in the Ketchikan region, the invertebrate filter-feeder Bugula neritina, and documented the continuing spread of three other non-native species.
The newly discovered invasive bryozoan, Bugula neritina. (Melissa Frey/Royal BC Museum)
Ketchikan, a town of about 8,000 people on the southern tip of Alaska, is a gateway to more remote Alaskan waters in the north. It sits fewer than 100 nautical miles from British Columbia, so invasive species travelling from southern ports are likely to appear in Ketchikan first. But detecting marine invasive species is a constant challenge, even in a single harbor. By collaborating with citizen scientists from Ketchikan, Smithsonian researchers were able to document these new invasive species hopefully as soon as they arrived.
The invasive tunicate Botrylloides violaecus has nearly completely covered this crab’s shell. (Gary Freitag/University of Alaska Fairbanks)
“It’s really important to know when new non-native species show up. They may be tiny invertebrates, but they can create big problems,” said lead author Laura Jurgens, who was a SERC postdoc at the time of the study. “Early detection means you have a better chance of controlling them before the populations get established. In other places, like California, Oregon and Washington, these organisms have displaced local marine animals or had economic impacts by fouling boats, fishing or aquaculture gear.”
Infected eelgrass blades show the dark lesions of eelgrass wasting disease. (Credit: Olivia Graham/Cornell)
by Kristen Minogue
Every year, the world loses an estimated 7 percent of its seagrasses. While the reasons are manifold, one culprit has long confounded scientists: eelgrass wasting disease. This September a team of biologists is zeroing in on the problem, in the first study of the disease to stretch along the Pacific Coast from southern California to Alaska, with a $1.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
“There are a number of seagrass monitoring programs that work on regional and to some degree on global scales, but most of them are really only looking at the cover and the abundance of the seagrass itself,” said Emmett Duffy, director of the Marine Global Earth Observatories (MarineGEO) headquartered at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.
The new grant builds on collaborative work by the Zostera Experimental Network (ZEN), led by Duffy, and will look at how climate, biodiversity and other environmental aspects can change the course of the disease. The team is deploying a wide arsenal of weapons to understand it: In addition to marine biologists, they are bringing on geographers, computer scientists, artificial intelligence and drones. Click to continue »
Posted in Climate Change, Grants | Comments Off on Eelgrass Wasting Disease Has New Enemies: Drones & Artificial Intelligence
Stress is universal – possibly the most constant aspect of life on Earth. And it’s not just for things with a brainstem. Plants are constantly reacting to their environments; they’re just more private about it. They’re constantly adjusting internal chemical signals, redistributing sugar and water, and sometimes jettisoning unneeded bits in the name of survival.
Lyntana Brougham, a visiting scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), is using these stress responses to look inside a salt marsh. By understanding how marsh plants like cordgrasses and sedges respond to higher temperatures, she hopes to develop a clearer picture of how climate change may stress the marsh as a whole.
Cordgrass at the GCREW marsh. (Philip Kiefer/SERC)
Every summer, cownose rays stream into Chesapeake Bay to mate and give birth to their pups. When autumn comes, they disappear—presumably to migrate south, but no one knew for certain where they spent the winter. Now, after a three-year tagging study published Aug. 23 and led by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), scientists have solved the mystery. Cownose rays all along the Atlantic winter near Cape Canaveral, Florida, and it’s likely they return to the same spots each summer. Click to continue »
Even healthy trees in the forest, like this tulip poplar, might be producing methane.
Until a decade ago, scientists believed forests were ravenous consumers of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. But we’re discovering that the story is more complicated. It turns out that while forest soils absorb methane, trees might actually release the gas. The problem is, no one is sure how much methane the trees are producing, or why they’re producing it at all.
“We’ve seen anything from 5 percent to 100 percent offset,” says Paul Brewer, a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). That’s an enormous amount of uncertainty: The forest could be consuming as much methane as we once thought (almost all of it), or barely any at all.
SERC Intern Helps Pin Down Numbers
Maddie Peterson, an intern working for Brewer at the SERC Biogeochemistry Lab, is spending her summer trying to pin these numbers down.
She’s working to solve two questions. First, how much methane is an average tree releasing? And second, why is it doing so at all?
“The big question,” says Peterson, “is whether the trees are acting as straws” – siphoning methane up from deep in the earth – “or incubators” – cradling methane-producing bacteria in their trunks. Answering these questions will help scientists understand how methane moves in and out of the atmosphere, which is critical for predicting the course of climate change. Click to continue »
Posted in Climate Change, Interns | Comments Off on How’s a Tree like a Cradle and a Straw? SERC Intern Studies Forest Methane Emissions
