Among the many lessons we’ve learned from the COVID-19 pandemic is the value of having a highly skilled scientific workforce that is capable of leveraging its education to serve the broader community. Throughout the pandemic BIOS continued its long-standing research programs with new procedures in place and offered a record number of summer internships to on-island students, thus ensuring our continued commitment to science and science education.

Sampling offshore Bermuda this July, the BIOS-SCOPE (Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences – Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology) program completed its first full year of study to learn how marine microbes produce, transform, and leave behind dissolved organic matter as the seasons progress, and microbial communities wax and wane.

Lionfish are known for their voracious appetite: individuals can consume up to 90 percent of their body weight every day and they prey on more than 100 fish species, including many that are commercially and ecologically important.

Two long-serving members of the BIOS faculty assumed new roles this month in the Education Department, while members of the Institute wished former director Penelope Barnes farewell after four years of service.

Kevin Wong grew up in British Columbia, Canada, an area where snowy mountains, deep forests, and a nearby sea suit people like him with a love for the natural world.  He took his enjoyment of the outdoors to college at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, where he intended to study environmental engineering. However, it was after changing majors in his second year—and an auspicious Internet search introduced him to BIOS—that he realized his true passion lay in research aimed at determining the impacts of human activities on the environment.

The gender disparity within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degree programs and the college-educated workforce is an issue that has faced colleges, universities, funding agencies, and employers for decades.

At midnight on a warm night off Bermuda in July, research technician Joe Cope and a small team of crew members prepared to deploy a net system stretching nearly the length of a city bus from the stern of the research vessel Atlantic Explorer. Though it’s not unusual for oceanographers to work around the clock during a research cruise, the timing of this particular cast was important. Every night, under cover of darkness, the marine animals they hoped to capture—some a few inches in length, others the size of a sand grain—come to the surface to feed on phytoplankton, after spending the daylight hours far below the surface, hiding from predators.

The BIOS-operated vessel Atlantic Explorer docked at the Hamilton Princess Hotel & Beach Club on September 22 for a special evening that included ship tours, mingling on the dock with BIOS researchers, and the opportunity to view a television program that features BIOS’s internationally recognized work on climate change research.

Bottles, bits of plastic, and a discarded lawn chair were among items pulled from Whalebone Bay and Mullet Bay during the annual Ocean Conservancy international coastal clean up on September 16, sponsored locally by Ernst and Young in partnership with Keep Bermuda Beautiful.

Twice a day on Bermuda—and at weather stations around the world—meteorologists launch huge helium or hydrogen-filled weather balloons equipped with sensors that monitor temperature, moisture, and pressure in the atmosphere. The data generated by balloon launches are then transmitted globally by weather services and assimilated into computer models, which meteorologists use to forecast the weather.