2008 Photo Highlights : 2008 Annual Report

1. MIT/WHOI Joint Program graduate student Kelton McMahon (front) and WHOI research assistant Leah Houghton enter a large underwater cavern on a Red Sea coral reef off Alith, Saudi Arabia in search of adult snapper fish. By analyzing fish otoliths, or ear bones, McMahon can discern where fish spent their formative juvenile years and help identify critical areas that should be protected to prevent the demise of coral reef fish populations. (Photo by Michael Berumen, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

2. Summer student Lauren Watka from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth holds a petri dish of fish eggs from mummichogs, Fundulus heteroclitus. Working with post-doctoral fellow Matthew Jenny in WHOI biologist John Stegeman's laboratory, she assisted with in vitro fertilization of eggs from fish collected from a reference ("clean") site, and a Superfund site (New Bedford Harbor) contaminated with toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Part of Watka's project was to compare how fish embryos from the two sites developed and expressed genes for proteins called cytochrome P 450s that help detoxify PCBs. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

3. MIT/WHOI graduate student Desirée Plata prepares a flame torch to seal samples for carbon isotope measurements in her lab experiments. Her research has shown that differently manufactured carbon nanotubes have distinctive chemical characteristics, making it more difficult to track them in the environment. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

4. MIT/WHOI Joint Program student Louie Wurch (top) and chemistry research assistant Justin Ossolinski recover a conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) rosette from the Sargasso Sea in April 2008. Marine chemist Ben Van Mooy led the interdisciplinary research cruise on the Oceanus, which included scientists working on the biogeochemistry of the region; specifically, how phosphorus and other nutrients affect and limit the growth of phytoplankton in the ocean. (Photo by Mar Nieto Cid, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

5. New graduate students in the MIT/WHOI Joint Program gather alongside ship's crew on the deck of the Corwith Cramer on June 24, 2008. They would later set sail on a week-long cruise to develop their skills in ocean sampling and seafaring. The graduate school also sends them out to sea to bond with the classmates that they will study with, work alongside, and commiserate with for the next four to six years. The annual cruise was newly dedicated to the memory of Jake Peirson, longtime associate dean and backbone of the Joint Program. (Photo by Jayne Doucette, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

6. WHOI postdoctoral scholar Tim Shanahan and MIT/WHOI student Kim Popendorf—both from the Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry—work to filter plankton from water samples in the main lab of the research vessel Oceanus in April 2008. On an expedition led by marine chemist Ben Van Mooy, researchers examined the communities of plankton that they found in the North Atlantic's Sargasso Sea, as well as the water chemistry (particularly nutrients) that promoted or inhibited the growth of various species. The cruise was the first ever for Shanahan. (Photo by Ben van Mooy, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

7. Graduate students Chris Murphy (in the water), Rogelio Morales-Garcia (holding the instrument), and Clayton Kunz work to calibrate a camera system in the new test tank in WHOI's Coastal Research Laboratory. Working with engineer Hanu Singh, the group is examining the fundamentals of camera calibration—particularly for color correction and distortion—as the traditional techniques for land-based photo applications are not analytically correct underwater. ((Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution))

8. Undergraduate Andrew Delman (Yale University), scientist Andrew Ashton (blue cap, WHOI Geology and Geophysics Department) and Guest Student Nick Magliocca (red cap, Duke University) trek through the sand in the Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve on Cape Cod, Mass. in July, 2008. Using Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) they searched for below-the-surface deposits left by past storms, to investigate how barrier beaches respond to changes in storminess and sea level. As a WHOI Summer Student Fellow, Delman spent the summer collecting and analyzing data and developing a model of long-term barrier-beach evolution. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

9. WHOI postdoctoral fellow Mar Nieto-Cid adds seawater to a filtration system in the main laboratory of the research vessel Oceanus during a cruise in the North Atlantic in April 2008. The system separates low molecular weight organic matter out of the water so that Nieto-Cid and WHOI chemist Dan Repeta can study how the characteristics of dissolved organic matter affect how microbes consume, degrade, and cycle it. "This is a little understood but large piece of the marine carbon cycle," said Repeta, "and we are investigating what microbes are responsible, and how the chemical composition of the carbon affects microbial activity and diversity." (Photo by Alexander Dorsk, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

10. Postdoctoral researcher Justin Ries holds a temperate-water coral—one of many shell-forming marine animals he grew under elevated carbon dioxide levels, which increases the seawater's acidity. Working with Anne Cohen and Dan McCorkle of the Geology and Geophysics Department, he conducted the experiment to measure the effects of high-CO₂ levels on living shelled marine animals. Many coral species may be vulnerable to increasing CO₂ in the atmosphere, because more-acidic seawater can make it difficult for them to construct their calcium carbonate skeletons. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

11. MIT/WHOI Joint Program student Stephanie Waterman holds the “beta boat,” a unique instrument she built with physical oceanographer John Whitehead and engineer Keith Bradley for her experiments on how ocean currents may form. Essentially a free-floating plunger, the ‘boat’s’ motor drives a disc up and down, generating waves in a rotating tank that mimics Earth’s ocean. Waterman did her experiments in the geophysical fluid dynamics laboratory at WHOI, which boasts a long history of studying theoretical aspects of ocean motion. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

12. WHOI postdoctoral fellow Nicole Keller (Geology & Geophysics) takes a break from hiking the Barva volcano in Costa Rica in June 2008 to surround herself with the monstrous leaf of the Sombrillo de Pobre ("poor man's umbrella", or Gunnera insignis). Keller and WHOI volcanologist Alison Shaw hiked the volcano to collect samples ash and rock samples for a study of the sulfur cycle in volcanic systems. (Photo by Alison Shaw, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

13. MIT/WHOI Joint Program graduate students and their instructors take a break from hiking for a group photo at the base of Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica during a June 2008 field study tour. Each annual WHOI Geodynamics Seminar Series concludes with a trip to critical geological locations related to the program's themes. The 2008 series focused on convergent plate boundary systems, which host a range of processes, including planetary-scale volatile and geochemical cycling, tectonics, seismicity, and volcanism. (Photo by Jay Barr, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

14. MIT/WHOI Joint Program student Stephanie Owens isn't on a jungle gym—she's checking specialized pumps used to filter water collected at various depths in the ocean and extract trace amounts of iron from the samples. Owens and WHOI scientist Pheobe Lam used the pumps, made by McLane Labs, on a research cruise near Africa in September 2008. They wanted to test the hypothesis that northeast Africa provides significant amounts of iron, a nutrient necessary for the ocean's food web, to the eastern tropical Atlantic. (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

15. MIT/WHOI Joint Program student Kate Buckman stands in front of the submersible Alvin, holding the iconic animal from undersea hydrothermal vents: a giant tubeworm (Riftia pachyptila.) The fast-growing worms have fascinated biologists since their discovery as part of an ecosystem—from bacteria to fishes—that depends on chemical energy from the earth, not light from the sun. Buckman, a student in biologist Tim Shank’s lab, studies the genetics and ecology of hydrothermal vent fishes. On this cruise in June 2008, using Alvin, she collected animals for genetic analysis from 2,500m (1.5 mile)-deep vent sites at 9 degrees North off the west coast of Mexico. (Photo by Lance Wills, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

16. Jorge Barbosa, an undergraduate at the State University of New York School of Environmental Science and Forestry, spent summer 2008 as a WHOI Summer Student Fellow. Working in the laboratory of Carl Lamborg, he analyzed the mercury levels of animals that live near hydrothermal vents—the first time such measurements have been made. Mercury in the ocean is passed up the food chain as the toxic compound methylmercury, becoming concentrated in top predators such as tuna and swordfish. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

17. While on board R/V Roger Revelle at the WHOI dock in July 2008, Summer Student Fellow Kaitlyn McCartney (MIT) adjusted a sampler designed by WHOI Post-doctoral Scholar Chip Breier (left, Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering Department.) The new "SUPR" sampler (Suspended Particulate Rosette) collects particles within intensely hot, high-pressure fluid plumes rising from hydrothermal vents—part of efforts to analyze deep-sea compounds in place. McCartney, sponsored by engineer Sheri White, designed the frame to mount SUPR on the ROV Jason (background), and participated in a cruise to collect particles from mid-Atlantic black smoker vents. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

18. The small white object on MIT/WHOI Joint Program student Kelton McMahon's finger is a fish's otolith, or ear bone. Otoliths are composed of layers secreted by a fish every day of its life, incorporating trace impurities from water the fish swims through—which provides a chemical record of where the fish has traveled. McMahon, a student in biologist Simon Thorrold's lab, studies the connections between adult coral reef fish and their juvenile nurseries in mangroves, in study areas including the Liquid Jungle Lab in Panama and coral reefs in the Red Sea. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

19. Undergraduate student Tobin Hammer prepares a colorful nutrient solution for culturing micro-organisms in WHOI microbiologist Stefan Sievert's microbial ecology laboratory. Hammer, a 2008 Summer Student Fellow from the University of California, San Diego, worked on assessing the diversity of bacteria in deep-sea sediments from hydrothermal vents in Guaymas Basin in the Gulf of California, Mexico. His project involved aspects of microbial ecology, cultivating anaerobic (without oxygen) bacteria, and molecular techniques, and he found a high diversity of bacteria in the Guaymas sediments. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

20. MIT/WHOI Joint Program graduate student Christine Mingione filters plankton samples from Waquoit Bay in search of shellfish larvae, which are no bigger than a fine grain of sand. Back at the lab in the Biology Department, she will count the larvae under a microscope and image them using polarized light. Mingione is working with WHOI biologist Scott Gallager and Chris Weidman, director of research at the nearby Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, to fill in the blanks between the larval and adult stages of shellfish, such as scallops. Such fundamental missing information is essential for efforts to sustain and restore natural populations. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

21. Students Nicole Trenhom (in cap) and Zion Klos used ground-penetrating radar this summer in a Cape Cod kettle pond to look for signs of former shorelines deposited during ancient droughts. They worked with WHOI geologist Jeff Donnelly, who studies these types of "natural archives" to reconstruct past environmental conditions. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

22. MIT/WHOI Joint Program student Evelyn Mervine paused to take in the beauty of Arenal Volcano during a June 2008 field study tour in Costa Rica. The pyroclastic flow from Arenal — the country’s most continuously active volcano — is also known as a nuée ardent, which means "glowing cloud.” The field trip wrapped up the spring WHOI Geodynamics Seminar Series, a semester of weekly seminars given by scientists invited from many research institutions on cutting-edge research on a particular earth sciences topic. (Photo by Einat Lev, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

23. MIT/WHOI Joint Program graduate students Annette Hynes, Elizabeth Orchard, and Phoebe Dreux Chappell make up the trio known as “Team Tricho.” Working in the microbial biogeochemistry group at WHOI, the team investigates critical marine bacteria called Trichodesmium. Trichodesmium are cyanobacteria that fix nitrogen in nutrient-poor oceans. By studying the different species of Trichodesmium and how the bacteria obtain and use nutrients, the trio hopes to get a more detailed and global view of the ocean nitrogen cycle. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

24. Joint Program student Fern Gibbons scoops thin slices of mud from a long sediment core taken from the sea floor. Rinsing the mud samples through a sieve releases tiny fossil shells of organisms that lived in the ocean, died, and drifted down to the bottom. Gibbons analyzes the shells' chemistry for clues to the temperature of the ocean when they lived and when monsoons happened in the past—part of ongoing paleoceanographic research at WHOI. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

25. Holding up a culture plate, Joint Program student Laura Hmelo checks the growth of bacterial colonies. Hmelo is studying a phenomenon called bacterial "quorum sensing"— how marine bacteria found in slimy coatings on hard surfaces (biofilms) use chemical signals to communicate with each other. This communication tells the bacteria when they reach large numbers and enables them to do more together than they could individually. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

Last updated: August 5, 2009