Reef scientist Eric Hochberg is principal investigator in a NASA field campaign that will survey more of the world’s coral reefs than ever before, and in greater detail. Credit Eric Hochberg

The GREAT BARRIER REEF, transposed to North America’s west coast, would stretch from Baja California to British Columbia. “How do you study that big of an area by doing hour-long hikes?,” says Eric Hochberg, a marine biologist at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences. Yet for a long time, scientists studying coral have essentially had to do just that. Since the 1950s, says Hochberg, the state of the art has been a mask and a scuba tank. Scientists studying coral reefs do so an hour at a time, until their air runs out.

Coral reefs have almost always been studied up close, by scientists in the water looking at small portions of larger reefs to gather data and knowledge about the larger ecosystems. But NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is taking a step back and getting a wider view, from about 23,000 ft above.

A global marine research project designed to justify marine protected areas worldwide is set to launch in Bermuda next spring and will include the expertise of BIOS coral reef scientist Gretchen Goodbody-Gringley.

When BIOS coral reef ecologist Samantha de Putron began tackling a project that required multiple, ongoing experiments to address a major portion of an overarching research question, she turned to a resource that scientists have long relied on: interns. And, much like the symbiotic algae in the corals that de Putron studies, this arrangement benefited everyone involved, including two Princeton University students who are using the opportunity to conduct their senior thesis research at BIOS.

Sean McNally, former BIOS Fall Semester student, Grant-in-Aid recipient, and teaching assistant (currently at the University of Massachusetts Boston School for the Environment), and his colleagues, recently had a paper published in the journal Limnology & Oceanography (L&O) revealing how corals influence the communities of microorganisms in the waters around them. Read more at www.whoi.edu/news-release/picoplankton

After six weeks in Australia, NASA’s COral Reef Airborne Laboratory (CORAL) has completed its campaign along the world’s largest reef structure—the Great Barrier Reef. Eric Hochberg, BIOS reef scientist and CORAL principle investigator, says he’s pleased with the “successful conclusion to the first of four field campaigns designed to shed light on the condition and function of representative reef ecosystems around the world.”

When Samia Sarkis dreamed of planting gardens on Bermuda, she didn’t envision blooming flowers for picking or rows of lettuce for eating, but instead vast beds of undersea corals.

After two years, the comprehensive review paper of the NASA Surface Biology and Geology (SBG) Algorithms Working Group, representing the work of 60 scientists from 40 institutions in seven countries, was published last month in the scientific journal Remote Sensing of Environment.

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.