This fall, BIOS will again welcome U.S. undergraduate students to its campus as part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program. But this year, there will be an exciting new twist to the internship experience.

Bermudian Claire Fox joined BIOS this month as a science education officer, bringing to the job her experience as a BIOS intern, and as a former employee and volunteer for a variety of island-based science education outlets, plus university-level science training.

On June 8, seven BIOS employees will take part in a virtual career fair hosted by the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute (BUEI) in honor of World Oceans Day. The event’s theme, “The Ocean: Life & Livelihoods,” is designed to help local high school and college students explore the wide variety of career opportunities that exist in fields related to ocean science.

After months of precautionary cancellations due to the pandemic, BIOS staff hosted several school groups on campus this June for marine science studies that complement public and private school curriculums.

This summer, there is a new addition to BIOS: a 20-foot (6 meter) x 4-foot (1.2 meter) above-ground pool, dubbed the Underwater Robotics Innovation Test Pool. The pool is serving as a testing facility this summer for underwater robots, also known as remotely operated vehicles (or ROVs), as part of BIOS’s Mid-Atlantic Robotics IN Education (MARINE) program which is sponsored by RenaissanceRe.

In early August, a team of researchers with the multi-year, multi-institutional BIOS-SCOPE (Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences – Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology) program completed their seventh research cruise aboard the BIOS-operated research vessel Atlantic Explorer. For four days, 13 scientists from eight institutions came together to study the unique microbial communities that develop in the Sargasso Sea during the summer, as well as the dissolved organic matter (DOM) they produce, consume, and redistribute throughout the water column.

For two sessions this summer (July 19 to 23 and July 26 to 28), 19 students aged 12 to 15 got to experience Bermuda’s marine environments and learn the foundations of scientific investigations through BIOS’s Ocean Science Camp. Now in its third year, the camp is designed for students who are interested in the ocean, but may not have had previous opportunities to study marine science.

A recently awarded grant from the National Science Foundation is set to bring a variety of improvements to the existing outdoor mesocosm facility at BIOS. Originally constructed in 2018 with funding from the Heising-Simons Foundation, International, the mesocosm facility is essentially a large outdoor aquarium comprising four large tanks (400 gallon, or 1,500 liter) and eight small tanks (130 gallon, or 500 liter) housed under a removable canopy. The tanks are located adjacent to a small laboratory trailer, which is used as a staging area and for sample processing.

BIOS is one of thirteen academic and research institutions participating in a newly-announced National Science Foundation (NSF) Science and Technology Center (STC) intended to develop a deeper understanding of the role that marine microbes play in changing ocean conditions and the global carbon cycle. Over the next five years, the STC will leverage recent scientific advances, incorporate new technologies, and engage educators and policymakers to promote a deeper understanding of the chemicals and chemical processes that underpin ocean ecosystems.

This summer, due to demand from student applicants, BIOS offered two sessions of its Coral Reef Ecology (CRE) course, one that ran from June 28 to July 16 with 13 students, and the other that ran from August 9 to August 27 with 17 students. The courses were co-taught by reef systems ecologist Eric Hochberg and marine benthic ecologist Yvonne Sawall, with teaching assistant (TA) Michael Wooster. Wooster was Hochberg’s National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates intern in 2014 and has been a TA for three BIOS summer courses and three fall semester courses.