Scientists estimate there are more than a million times more viruses in the ocean than stars in the universe. While wildly abundant, their tiny sizes present a big a hurdle to fully understanding their function in ocean ecosystems. If a cell were the size of a baseball stadium, a virus would be roughly the size of a baseball, so not only are viruses difficult to see under the microscope, but even gathering enough of their genetic material to analyze can be tricky.

After five years, with more than 25 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, six dedicated research cruises, and more than 45 presentations at national and international meetings, the BIOS-SCOPE (Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences – Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology) program has received five years of additional funding from the Simons Foundation International to continue its study of the microbial oceanography of the Sargasso Sea.

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.

In the Southern Ocean, cold surface water sinks to about 1,500 feet (500 meters) and travels in the dark for thousands of miles before resurfacing, some 40 years later, near the equator in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian ocean basins. Scientists call this major water mass the Sub-Antarctic Mode Water, or SAMW, and it is regarded as a powerhouse of a mixer in the oceans. It’s also critical to marine life; when it warms and rises into the sunlit subtropical and tropical waters, the nutrients it contains are estimated to fuel up to 75 percent of the microscopic plants growing there.

Chloe Emerson initially came to BIOS in the fall of 2014 for the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) internship program funded by the National Science Foundation.  As a Wellesley College senior working to complete her major in Biology and minor in Philosophy, Emerson already found developmental biology and stem cell research fascinating. At BIOS, these interests crystalized as she began to study sea urchins in Andrea Bodnar’s Molecular Discovery Laboratory, leading her down a path in regenerative biology that she hardly could have imagined two years ago.

To maintain the unparalleled 27-year record of natural ocean processes and human-induced change at the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study (BATS) site, four BIOS research technicians work to collect monthly measurements at sea, process samples in the lab, and analyze incoming data.  Over the past year, each of them has also gone beyond their basic duties with research forays into the time-series dataset.  This month, the four traveled to New Orleans, Louisiana, to present their results at the 2016 Ocean Sciences Meeting.

Not many people willingly sign up for a multi-week research cruise in freezing temperatures where fresh produce typically runs out after the second week at sea. But BIOS research specialist Becky Garley is excited at the prospect of returning to the Arctic for the third time next September 2022 as part of the Synoptic Arctic Survey (SAS).

In mid-November, the BIOS-operated research vessel Atlantic Explorer headed into the Sargasso Sea for the eighth research cruise as part of the multi-year, multi-institutional BIOS-SCOPE (Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences – Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology) project. Since 2015, scientists from Bermuda, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States have converged at BIOS to investigate the microbial ecology of the Sargasso Sea and understand how organic matter (carbon) cycles within the marine environment.

Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, toured BIOS this month during a visit to Bermuda to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the country’s Duke Of Edinburgh International Award.

Five years of data collected on reefs and offshore in Bermuda shows that coral reef chemistry – and perhaps the future success of corals – is tied not only to the human carbon emissions causing systematic ocean acidification, but also to seasonal and decadal cycles in the open waters of the Atlantic, and the balance of biochemical processes in the coral reef community.