New study finds nighttime peaks in bacterial activity and carbon cycling in the ocean

ASU’s online students can step beyond the screen with optional hands-on experience at BIOS

A Community of BATS: The Collaborative Engine behind the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study

Field researchers share insights at annual PACE meeting, strengthening global efforts to monitor ocean health and climate change

Online learning platforms are connecting students from around the world

Collaborative efforts send profiler to work in the mesopelagic zones of the Atlantic Ocean

The exhibit explores the exquisite beauty of plankton and its crucial role not only in ocean ecosystems, but in how ocean health is critical to our survival and elemental to all life on our planet.

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.

A new study published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science is changing the way that biological oceanographers view the swimming and sinking behaviors of open ocean, or pelagic, snails. Pteropods and heteropods are small marine snails, most measuring on the order of millimeters to centimeters, that are found throughout the world’s ocean from the surface to depths of 3000 feet (1000 meters). Although small in size, these organisms play a vital role in the ocean’s food web and biogeochemical cycles, as well as the global carbon cycle.