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  • Penguins, Robots, The Ocean and more

    Penguins, Robots, The Ocean and more

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    Newswise — Fieldwork in Antarctica is tricky, just ask University of Delaware scientist Matthew Breece. There is the 10-day trek to get there from Delaware, which includes a sometimes stomach-revolting four-day sail through Drake Passage, heavy research equipment to manage, limits on what you can pack. The temperatures are cool, averaging just above freezing at around 36 degrees Fahrenheit in the austral summer from October to February. Weather can change rapidly, too, relegating researchers indoors when conditions are poor and making for very long days in the field when conditions are pristine.

    But if you ask a scientist…or student…if the effort is worth it, the answer is a resounding YES!

    Marine biology students at Caesar Rodney High School in Camden, Delaware, got a firsthand look at what it’s like to conduct field research on penguins in Antarctica on Tuesday, Jan. 24, during a live video call with Matthew Breece, a research scientist in marine science and policy at the University of Delaware.

    “It’s fun, but also a lot of hard work,” said Breece, who guided the nearly 50 students through a virtual tour of Palmer Station, a United States research station situated on Anvers Island, Antarctica.

    Breece showed the students glaciers, laboratory experiments, research equipment and common areas, like the library, and shared stories and answered questions about living among wildlife including penguins, whales and seals. 

    “Wildlife have the right of way here,” said Breece, explaining how researchers were scrambling over rocks to get to their research vessels earlier in the week, while a crab-eater seal sunned itself on the boat dock. Gentoo penguins can swim 22 miles per hour, which is faster than the research boats can go, while Adélie penguins can only swim 10-12 mph.

    Breece and his colleagues are examining the feeding habits and predator-prey interactions of Adélie and Gentoo penguins in the region using an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The AUV, called a REMUS, is equipped with a high-resolution echosounder that uses sonar to collect data about food resources that are available to marine animals in Palmer Deep Canyon on the West Antarctic Peninsula.

    Besides hearing from Breece, students also saw dramatic photographs from Antarctica and scientific charts used in the research.

    The new echosounder gives researchers a birds-eye view of what’s for lunch in the water. It was developed by Mark Moline, Maxwell P. and Mildred H. Harrington Professor of Marine Studies at UD and principal investigator on the project, and project co-PIs Kelly Benoit-Bird, senior scientist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Megan Cimino, assistant researcher at the Institute of Marine Sciences and assistant adjunct professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

    “We switched to shorter wavelength frequencies to look at smaller things,” said Moline. “So, not only looking at the oceanography, but also the high-resolution food distribution of krill, copepods, fish and the species that eat them, like penguins.”

    The UD work complements the National Science Foundation’s ongoing Palmer Station Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) study related to penguin population sizes and foraging ranges. The seabird component of the Palmer LTER research is led by Cimino, a UD alumna.

    Cimino has a second project with Carlos Moffat, a UD coastal physical oceanographer who also is in Antarctica serving as chief scientist of the Palmer LTER program, which has been collecting long-term ecological data for over 30 years. Collaborating institutions on the broader Palmer LTER study, led by Rutgers University and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), include researchers from UD, University of Virginia, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, University of Colorado, and University of California, Santa Cruz.

    Moffat also is conducting physical oceanography work as part of his NSF CAREER award to understand the dynamics of melting glaciers and how that impacts the ocean circulation and properties, such as salinity and temperature of the coastal ocean.

    “As the atmosphere is warming in this region of Antarctica, sea ice is decreasing and more glaciers are melting from the coast, physically changing the environment marine organisms are living in,” said Moffat. “One big question is what this means long term for marine organisms that live in these places, such as penguins, whales, seals and other wildlife. I see my contribution as trying to help them understand how the physical environment impacts the entire ecosystem.”

    From Antarctica to Delaware

    Lessons learned in Antarctica can help shed light on uncertainties about how sea level rise will evolve in other parts of the world, too. For instance, Delaware is a low-lying state with no area of the state more than eight miles from tidal waters. It is considered a big hotspot of sea level rise along the U.S. East Coast. And while sea levels are increasing on average around the world, due to ocean warming and melting ice from the continents, the distribution of sea level is very uneven. 

    “To understand what is going to happen in the future, we need to understand why sea levels are increasing and how it’s going to change over time,” said Moffat. “Antarctica is a good place to study this because change is happening very rapidly.”

    For most of the 20th century, the Palmer Station region was considered the fastest changing region in the southern hemisphere, while the Weddell Sea, which is located just around the corner of the Antarctic peninsula, had not changed as much. Over the last few years, researchers have begun to wonder whether the Weddell Sea has any influence on the West Antarctic Peninsula region or whether the regions are changing independently.

    To better understand these processes, Moffat’s team deployed two AUVs called gliders to sample the circulation close to the coast along the Antarctic peninsula, which is heavily influenced by the melting of glaciers. He and his students recovered oceanographic moorings that have been capturing data, such as water circulation currents, temperature and salinity, since early 2022. This is part of the West Antarctic Peninsula that has never been sampled before, so the team is eager to analyze the data.

    “I am particularly excited about the glider measurements, which I plan to add to my dissertation,” said Frederike (Rikki) Benz, a doctoral student in the Moffat lab. “It is especially interesting to be involved in the whole process from preparing, shipping and deploying to publishing.”

    Classrooms beyond campus

    For students, field research offers the opportunity for hands-on experience with sophisticated research instruments, data collection and analysis, troubleshooting and networking with researchers from other institutions. Sometimes those activities occur in remote regions of the world — like Antarctica.

    “The rarity of this experience comes with a sense of humility and responsibility to not take any moment for granted, a responsibility to ensure more opportunities are available for future students and scientists,” said Evan Quinter, who is pursuing a master’s degree in physical ocean science and engineering in the Moffat Lab.

    At Caesar Rodney High School, marine biology teachers Cristine Taylor and Sandra Ramsdell have just begun covering marine animals with their students. It is a fitting coincidence that made the live call with UD researchers both timely and meaningful.

    “Spending a day in class speaking with researchers was an awesome experience for our students,” said Taylor. “We are trying to encourage them to look at everything that goes into marine careers. Not every person is a marine biologist, there are computer scientists and engineers, ship captains and crew, and so many more people who can work in marine research.”

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    University of Delaware

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  • To save nature, focus on populations, not species

    To save nature, focus on populations, not species

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    Newswise — AMHERST, Mass. – Human-released greenhouse gasses are causing the world to warm, and with that warming comes increasing stress for many of the planet’s plants and animals. That stress is so great that many scientists believe we are currently in the midst of the “sixth extinction,” when entire species are disappearing up to 10,000 times faster than before the industrial era. However, scientists have been uncertain which ecosystems, and which species, are most at risk. New research, recently published in Nature Climate Change, is the first to show that the focus on species-level risk obscures a wide variability in temperature tolerance, even within the same species, and that this variability is greater for marine species than terrestrial ones. The findings have immediate implications for management and conservation practices and offer a window of hope in the effort to adapt to a rapidly warming world.

    “One of the most important biological discoveries in the last century is that evolution can happen much more quickly than previously thought,” says Brian Cheng, professor of marine ecology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the paper’s senior author. “One of the implications of this is that different populations of the exact same species can adapt to their local environments more readily than traditional biology would have thought possible.”

    It turns out that this rapid, localized adaptation may be able to help ensure survival in a warming world.

    By conducting a metanalysis of 90 previously published studies, from which Cheng and his co-authors mined data on 61 species, the team was able to construct a set of “upper thermal limits”—specific temperatures above which each species could not survive. However, by zooming in further and looking at 305 distinct populations drawn from that pool of 61 species, they found that different populations of the same marine species often had widely different thermal limits. This suggests that some populations have evolved different abilities to tolerate high temperatures. The key then, is to keep different populations of the same species connected so that the populations that have adapted to the higher temperatures can pass this advantage on to the populations with the lower thermal limits.

    In other words, imagine a wide-ranging marine species, such as the diminutive Atlantic killifish, which occurs from the warm Florida coast of the United States north to the frigid waters of Newfoundland, Canada. The northern killifish populations may be better able to withstand warming waters if some of their southern kin are able to naturally shift their range to the north.

    “Scale matters,” says Matthew Sasaki, a marine biologist and evolutionary ecologist who completed this research as part of his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Connecticut and is the paper’s lead author. “The patterns you see across species aren’t the same you see within species, and the big-picture story doesn’t necessarily match what is happening on the local level.”

    In yet another twist, the team, which was funded by the National Science Foundation and was composed of biologists specializing in terrestrial as well as marine ecosystems, discovered that this intra-species variability was primarily a feature of animals living in the ocean and intertidal areas. Populations of widespread species that live on land or in freshwater exhibit far more homogeneity in their thermal limits, and thus could be more sensitive to rising temperatures. However, on land, plants and animals can take advantage of microclimates to cool down and avoid extreme temperatures, by moving into shady spots, for example.

    Taken together, the research suggests that a one-size-fits-all-species approach to conservation and management won’t work. Instead, write the authors, we need to understand how populations have adapted to their local conditions if we want to predict their vulnerability to changing conditions. A more effective approach would include ensuring that marine species can find wide swaths of undamaged habitat throughout their entire range, so that different populations of the same species can mix and pass on the adaptations that help them survive warmer waters. And on land, we need to maintain large patches of cool ecosystems—such as old-growth forests—that terrestrial species can use as refuges.

    “The glimmer of hope here,” says Cheng, “is that with conservation policies tailored to individual populations, we can buy them time to adapt to the warming world.”

     

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    University of Massachusetts Amherst

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