A diverse and abundant group of single-celled marine organisms, Rhizaria are known to affect carbon and other chemical cycles of the world’s oceans, but specifics are lacking. Research has been hampered by difficulties sampling, culturing and preserving many types of this protist super-group, and they have been underrepresented in models of global geochemical cycling as a result. Researchers and partners from two U.S. universities are seeking to change that narrative through a new three-year National Science Foundation-funded study.

The highly anticipated and fully booked Climate Classroom made its return to the ASU BIOS campus recently, leading students through an immersive learning experience. The novel program highlighted climate change science while exploring current and future potential impacts for Bermuda. With exclusive donor support from HSBC, 230 students participated in this gamified immersive learning experience for M2s across Bermuda between February 27th and March 14th. The Climate Classroom invited students to explore the ASU BIOS campus, learning about the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems and Bermuda’s coastlines through the Curriculum Enrichment Program within ASU BIOS’s Ocean Academy. Students were exposed to future careers in ocean science, while piloting emerging media such as extended reality [XR].

Typically associated with the study of Earth’s upper atmosphere and beyond, satellites deployed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) also augment our understanding of Earth’s ecosystems, including critical information about the ocean such as locations of algal blooms and levels of marine photosynthesis.

Amy Maas, Ferhat Karakas and David Murphy never know what they’re going to turn up when they go trawling for zooplankton. ‘We work on the swimming of various sea butterfly species’, says Murphy, adding that unlike true butterflies, sea butterflies are miniscule snails that live at depth and swim to the surface at night, propelled by minute wings like flying insects. But one day in September 2017, the trio was in for a surprise. In addition to their usual haul of sea butterflies, Karakas and Maas turned up a pair of tiny heteropod snails, Atlanta selvagensis. ‘I had never heard of heteropods before’, admits Murphy. As virtually nothing was known about these rare aquatic molluscs, the trio rushed them back to Murphy’s high-tech zooplankton movie set in the lab, in the hope of catching them in the act of swimming.

Conservation research in submarine caves is among the clearest and most compelling use-cases for a small observation-class ROV like Trident, which is why, last week, we delivered the very first ROV for Good Sofar Ocean Trident to Dr. Leocadio Blanco-Bercial at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences to study the hidden biodiversity in Bermuda’s Anchialine Caves.

A robot submarine is to be deployed in a bid to study microscopic organisms in the island’s underwater caves.

Wedged between two windy weeks in April, calm weather descended upon Bermuda just as 11 graduate and PhD-bound students arrived at BIOS, primed to head out to sea for a taste of hands-on oceanography under the guidance of Institute scientists, technicians and support personnel.

A collaboration between Arizona State University’s “Ask A Biologist” website and researchers and educators at BIOS is helping students understand the fundamental concept of taxonomy, or grouping and classifying organisms based on their physical characteristics. Claire Fox (right), BIOS science education officer, designed an online, interactive game that leads players through the use of a dichotomous key, a tool that helps scientists identify unknown organisms—in this case, species of fish or zooplankton found in Bermuda. The game, called “Keys to the Ocean,” is tied into the “Identification Keys” lesson that is offered through BIOS’s Curriculum Enrichment Program as a 2.5-hour workshop, which includes the opportunity for students to conduct a plankton tow aboard a research vessel and view live plankton under microscopes.The history of taxonomy—or the science of naming, describing, and classifying organisms—is as old as human language and speaks to a fundamental desire to understand and bring order to the natural world. A new online game developed in partnership between Arizona State University’s (ASU’s) Ask A Biologist website and BIOS is combining this fascination with ongoing research to teach students how to use a dichotomous key, a tool that helps scientists identify unknown organisms.

Humans continue to amplify global warming by emitting billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. A new study reveals that a distant human relative plays an outsize role in damping the impacts of this greenhouse gas by pumping large amounts of carbon from the ocean surface to the deep sea, where it contributes nothing to current warming.

Living at the edge of darkness, the community of microbes and tiny animals in the ocean’s twilight zone upcycle nutrients to ensure their survival. A study led by researchers at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa revealed that small, free-floating animals called zooplankton rely mainly on an even smaller class of organisms, called microzooplankton, to consolidate the sparse waste products in the water and transform it into higher-quality food. The study was published in Limnology and Oceanography.