Fall 2013 ( Vol. 50 No. 2 )
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Our Ocean. Our Planet. Our Future.
What Causes the Atlantic to Bloom?
Every spring, waters in the North Atlantic Ocean explode into green and white patches as countless microscopic marine plants bloom.
Can Squid Abide Ocean's Lower pH?
To most people, squid are calamari: delicious when fried. But to WHOI researchers Max Kaplan and Aran Mooney, squid are another reason to be concerned about ocean acidification.
Lush Life, Deep Down
Scientists find an active ecosystem of bacteria, archaea, and fungi in the sediments far beneath the sea floor.
The Decline and Fall of the Emperor Penguin?
Climate change is shifting conditions on which Emperor penguins in Antarctica depend to sustain their populations.
What Doomed the Stromatolites?
About a billion years before the dinosaurs became extinct, stromatolites roamed the Earth until they mysteriously disappeared. Well, not roamed exactly. Stromatolites (“layered rocks”) are rocky structures made by photosynthetic…
An Oddity about Lyme Disease Bacteria
The bacterial species that causes Lyme disease avoids a key human defense by not requiring iron. For a WHOI microbial chemist, that raised a big question: What does it use instead of iron?
Corals' Indispensable Bacterial Buddies
Coral reefs, like human beings, may be superorganisms that depend on communities of microbes living within and around them for their survival.
Mining Marine Microbes for New Drugs
The ocean is a combat zone where marine microbes are constantly making chemical compounds to kill competitors or protect themselves. Could some of those compounds lead to pharmaceuticals that could help people?
Sassy Scallops
MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student Meredith White examined how increasingly acidic ocean waters affect scallop shells in their critical early stages of development.
A Quest For Resilient Reefs
Anne Cohen’s forte is corals. From the skeletons of massive corals, she has extracted long-term records of changing ocean and climate conditions. In lab experiments and expeditions, she is investigating…
The Harshest Habitats on Earth
With help from ROV Jason and a new, high-tech sampling instrument, scientists discover that even in a hyper-saline realm, with no light and no oxygen, under crushing pressure, life still finds a way.
Why Haven't the Cod Come Back?
A WHOI biologist is analyzing fish scales dating back to the 1930s to unravel changes in the ecosystem of Georges Bank, one the world's most productive fisheries.
An Ocean Instrument Is Born
Every new ocean instrument goes through growing pains. But the Submersible Incubation Device, nicknamed SID, has been a particularly long time coming. It started more than 30 years ago as…
Seabirds Face Risks from Climate Change
The research expedition ended in near-disaster. Stephanie Jenouvrier, aboard the ship Marion Dufresne II, was heading to the Southern Ocean to study seabirds. On Nov. 14, 2012, while making a…
Swimming with Sharks
Amy Kukulya’s clients often have curious requests, but this was among the oddest. As an engineer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), she has operated autonomous underwater vehicles beneath Arctic…
Caller IDs for Whales
Imagine extraterrestrials come to Earth, seeking to understand human life. They dangle recording devices beneath the clouds or occasionally tag people with retrievable recorders. They collect thousands of bits of…
Art Meets Science in a Book called Bloom
When conditions of light and nutrients align in the surface waters of the ocean, tiny single-celled algae called phytoplankton respond with explosive growth and reproduction in a phenomenon known as…
Lyme Disease Bacteria Have Quirky Needs
Scientists have confirmed that the pathogen that causes Lyme disease—unlike any other known organism—can exist without iron, a metal that all other life needs to make proteins and enzymes. Instead…
A Day in the Life of a Phytoplankter
Earth’s vast oceans teem with innumerable microscopic plants that make the fertility and abundance of the United States’ Grain Belt look like, well, a drop in the ocean. These tiny…
Barnacles and Biofilms
As long as sailors have been going down to the sea in ships, they have been coming back with their ships’ hulls coated with barnacles, algae, and slimy gunk. And…
What Is the Sound of 130 Wind Turbines Turning?
Federal officials examined a long list of potential impacts from the nation’s first offshore wind farm, slated to begin construction in Nantucket Sound in 2013: effects on ocean vistas, airplane…
A Robotic Albatross?
Oceanographer Phil Richardson formally retired in 1999, but that hardly diminished his passion and curiosity. Last year, he combined his scientific knowledge with longstanding interests in sailing and flying to…
Symbiosis in the Deep Sea
Mobs of pale shrimp clamber over each other, jockeying for position in the swirling flow of black-smoker vents on the seafloor where ultra-hot fluids from Earth’s interior meet cold seawater.…
Of Wings, Waves, and Winds
“Great albatross! The meanest birds Spring up and flit away, While thou must toil to gain a flight, And spread those pinions grey; But when they once are fairly poised,…
The Socioeconomic Costs of Ocean Acidification
The increasing acidification of the oceans is measured in pH units, but its impacts on people will be measured in dollar signs, says Sarah Cooley. Commercial and recreational fishing, tourism,…