Humans of many cultures have gone down to rivers to harvest eels for centuries, but even as eels were chopped into bait for fishing, or de-slimed, smoked and savored, they held on to a secret that stumps us to this day.
In balmy Bermuda, it is hard to imagine anything other than fresh air and sea breezes entering people’s lungs. But over the last two decades, scientists working with the Department of Environmental Protection have discovered there are some places in Bermuda where the air people breathe is similar to the polluted air of a big city.
Samia Sarkis, a marine biologist who was the principal investigator of the BIOS aquaculture program for seven years until 2003, returned this spring as an adjunct faculty member at the Institute.
Oceanographer Kristen Buck has been spared the gender discrimination faced by her female predecessors, who until the 1960s were often restricted from science labs, kept from leadership positions, or prohibited from sailing on research vessels.
When Bill Charrier’s two daughters were young, he and his wife Anne traveled during their spring vacations to Bermuda, where Charrier tended to corporate business for his East Coast-based shipping companies. One of his stockholders also served on the board at BIOS and introduced Charrier to the marine research and education goals at the institute.
Within the contours of oceanographic data are the stories of great ocean currents, tiny plankton, and life-sustaining nutrients at the surface of the sea. University students learn to study ocean properties through plots and graphs of these data, but rarely do they get hands-on experience with the instruments that generated them. A new BIOS summer course aims to change that by introducing students to the methods and technologies that have become the bread and butter of modern oceanography.
This Saturday, come cheer on the students competing in the 2015 ROV Angelfish Challenge! Mid-Atlantic Robotics in Education at BIOS. Each team will be piloting their own ROV through a series of underwater challenges at the National Sports Centre. The event opens to the public at 9am – hope to see you there!
In the clear waters off the coast of Bermuda, Dr. Craig Carlson has spent decades investigating the invisible forces shaping the global carbon cycle: millions of bacteria in every drop of seawater, consuming carbon compounds dissolved into the ocean like sugar into tea. Dr. Carlson’s research linking how microbes interact with carbon in the ocean is now considered vital to understanding the global carbon cycle, and he is being honored with a major award from the leading professional organization for aquatic scientists.
When Esra Mescioglu learned she was accepted to the Fall 2013 Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program at BIOS, she didn’t know what to expect. Frankly, she was a little nervous to leave behind her friends and routine at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Now, more than a year after her internship in Bermuda, she is thankful her nerves didn’t deter her and is flying from one scientific adventure to the next. Last week Mescioglu is presenting the results of her research project at the Aquatic Sciences meeting of the American Society for Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) in Granada, Spain, and is quick to share how valuable her experience in the BIOS REU program was.