Unlocking Ocean Mysteries

ASU BIOS awarded Tim Noyes the 2024 Cawthorn Innovation Fund grant, which he will use to research marine biodiversity using Environmental DNA Metabarcoding technology on board the CMV Oleander III cargo ship.

The Cawthorn Innovation Fund, founded in 2016 by Trustee Emeritus Rob Cawthorn, is a source of funding awarded to ASU Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (ASU BIOS) scientists to promote innovative research ideas while encouraging collaboration between research teams. For nearly a decade, the Cawthorn Innovation Fund has supported groundbreaking research, enabling scientists to further develop their research centered around oceanographic and atmospheric science. 

A grant from the Cawthorn Innovation Fund has been awarded to Tim Noyes, PhD along with principal investigators Steve Saul, PhD (ASU), and Magdalena Andres, PhD (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution). Noyes’ research proposal, titled ‘Understanding Regional Scale Marine Biodiversity as Revealed by Environmental DNA Metabarcoding’, sparked regard as a topic worth investing in. 

Noyes is partnering with the CMV Oleander III cargo ship, a vessel that travels between Bermuda and Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, weekly. With the success of the Oleander Project as one of our collaborative long-term research programs with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, there is a unique opportunity to capitalize on what the CMV Oleander currently does for science and the potential for what she can do. 

Along with providing Bermuda with essential food and supplies to support life on the island, the ship has served as a volunteer research vessel that collects oceanographic data since the late 1970s. The CMV Oleander’s route crosses four bodies of water in the North Atlantic, including the Sargasso Sea, the Gulf Stream, the Slope Sea, and waters on the continental shelf. Noyes explains that there is this “massive swath of different environments which makes it fantastic” for conducting oceanographic research. He intends to “install a water sampler [RoCSI eDNA Sampler, refer to the image above] that will take water, filter it, and extract any DNA from different organisms.”

With Noyes as this year’s Cawthorn recipient, he explains how the Cawthorn Innovation Fund has enabled him to capitalize on the CMV Oleander platform by adding biological measurements and increasing the scientific capacity of the existing Oleander Project. Various instrumentation, such as Expendable Bathythermographs (XBTs), which are probes that take temperature profiles down to a maximum of 900 meters, and Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCPs), which are mounted to the ship to measure water velocity, are utilized to collect important datasets. This enables scientists to look at temperature transport from south to north, for example, to assess if the Gulf Stream is slowing down or shifting and deduce the impact of any changes globally. 

Noyes’ research is “looking for the fingerprints of the organisms that have been within the vicinity of the ship…the key part is, because we have the velocity data from the ADCPs, we can then look to see where the dominant flows of water particles are coming from. So, we begin to look at correlations between those fingerprints and what they’re detecting.” Currently, Noyes is looking at the presence of specific fish in the waters around the ship, with the potential to expand his scope to other taxa such as marine mammals. This, however, depends on the probes used to detect certain organisms. 

Preparing and installing a high-tech instrument such as the RoCSI eDNA Sampler is an ambitious task, and this marks the first time one has been installed on a ship. It takes around four months to build before it can be sent to Bermuda to be installed on board the CMV Oleander. Once the instrument has arrived on the island, bench testing will be performed, which Noyes can complete at ASU BIOS. The instrument will then be installed and trialed while the ship is in port. Subsequently, the instrument will operate over two to three crossings.

At this point, Noyes’ research can move into the sampling stages. “Once it’s taken a sample, it also pumps DNA preservatives into the filter, so you don’t have to worry about the further breakdown of the DNA to the point where we can’t do anything with it,” Noyes describes, highlighting the benefits of having the technical instrument on board. “The idea was that we would then pair the sampling with the XBTs to get the definite temperature, as well as the flow through temperature data and the current data from the ADCPs and put it all together and see what it does,” Noyes expresses, enthusiastically. 

The dataset currently collected onboard Oleander is set to be exponentially enhanced with the help of Noyes’ research efforts. With financial backing and a platform for endless opportunities from the Cawthorn Innovation Fund, state-of-the-art research can continue to thrive here at ASU BIOS.