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.

A molecular facility will enhance sample processing for researchers and experiential learning for students

It is not often that a piece of scientific equipment from BIOS’s research vessel (R/V) Atlantic Explorer gets the opportunity to help the broader community in Bermuda. But that is just what happened to an ultra-low temperature (ULT) freezer as the island prepared to receive and administer the newly developed COVID-19 vaccine.

The latest Scientist Selfie video, promoted by the National Science Foundation (NSF), features BIOS Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) intern Jerry Goss and his studies of plankton with BIOS ecologist Leocadio Blanco-Bercial.

Every time science researchers conduct an experiment at sea or make measurements in a lab, they gather tens of thousands of data points. Collectively, these tell a story of the places, organisms, and communities scientists study and the research questions they are addressing.

St. George’s, Bermuda –– An anonymous donor has awarded BIOS $6 million to support collaborative research on the distinctive microbial communities of the Sargasso Sea over the next five years. The research will leverage ocean measurements and ongoing research at the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study (BATS) site, bringing new collaborations and technologies to study the ocean’s smallest life forms.

Earlier this year, Leocadio Blanco-Bercial, a zooplankton ecologist at BIOS, was awarded funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a three-year investigation to determine how environmental variables, such as temperature and oxygen, influence the structure of zooplankton communities found within the ocean’s twilight zone (depths between 650 to 3000 feet, or 200 to 1000 meters), also known as the “midwater.”

Earlier this year, BIOS associate scientist and zooplankton ecologist Leocadio Blanco-Bercial published a paper in the scientific journal Frontiers in Marine Science that sheds light on zooplankton communities in the Sargasso Sea, where zooplankton diversity is among the highest in the world’s ocean.

For nearly a hundred years, scientists have known that plankton—the microscopic organisms that drift and float in the ocean, also known as marine microbes—form the basis of the ocean’s food web. Phytoplankton (literally “plant wanderers”) are photosynthetic, like their terrestrial counterparts, and convert sunlight into energy. Phytoplankton, in turn, are consumed by zooplankton (literally “animal wanderers”), as well as a host of larger marine organisms, including juvenile fish, shellfish, birds, and even whales. However, scientists are now learning that plankton play an even larger role in earth’s complex biogeochemical systems.

It’s not every day that you meet a high school student who already has three summers of scientific research, as well as a poster presentation at a professional scientific conference, under his belt. But Luke Stewart isn’t your average student.