In early May, scientists and research technicians with the BIOS-SCOPE (Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences – Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology) program met for their first data workshop since 2019, after two years of cancellations due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. BIOS-SCOPE, a program for the study of microbial oceanography in the Sargasso Sea, started the workshops in 2018 as a way for team members to share their research progress, collaboratively evaluate data, outline manuscripts for publication in scientific journals, and identify new research directions.

An interdisciplinary team of scientists joined forces in July for their first annual research cruise dedicated to revealing how specific microbes take up and transform organic matter within a web of ecological interactions in the waters southeast of Bermuda.

Justin Smith was raised in a fishing family in Gig Harbor, Washington, but a crash in the local fishing economy diverted him from the family business. Knowing he liked ships and being on the water, he decided to explore oceanography in college. Within his first month at the University of Hawaii, he discovered the Hawaii Ocean Time-series program and the research vessel Kilo Moana. His volunteer position on the ship led to a job in the physical oceanography lab. By graduation in 2009 he had logged 220 days at sea, and was inspired to pursue a hands-on, “jack-of-all-trades” career as a marine technician in the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) fleet.  

What keeps you up at night? Barking dogs, traffic in the city, perhaps noisy neighbors? For Samm Newton, a graduate student in the Oregon State University (OSU) Environmental Arts and Humanities program, it’s the challenges of connecting the public with the complex, global environmental threats facing society.

A new research facility under construction at BIOS will allow researchers to collect tiny organisms on coral reefs and in the open ocean, then monitor their growth, development, and community structure in temperature-controlled rooms at BIOS that simulate conditions found at sea.

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.

BIOS acquired three new instruments this spring to enrich investigations into the roles and interactions between microbial communities and migrating zooplankton in the Sargasso Sea.

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.

Sampling offshore Bermuda this July, the BIOS-SCOPE (Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences – Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology) program completed its first full year of study to learn how marine microbes produce, transform, and leave behind dissolved organic matter as the seasons progress, and microbial communities wax and wane.

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.