The Atlantic Ocean off the Northeast U.S. coast is known for its productive fisheries, which may be threatened by human activities, short-term environmental variability, and long-term trends. To decipher the contributions of natural and anthropogenic forcings and manage this intricate ecosystem, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced the selection of this critical ocean region Read More …
Grazing is the single largest loss factor of marine primary production and thus affects a key transfer rate between global organic and inorganic matter pools. Remarkably, data for herbivorous protist growth and grazing rates at temperatures representative of the vast polar regions and during winter and spring periods are extremely sparse. By combining laboratory experiments Read More …
The Menden-Deuer Lab gets to participate in a large, collaborative study resolving key processes controlling the abundance and distribution of phytoplankton in the North Atlantic and of course the ramifications of plankton dynamics for the coupled ocean ecosystem and atmosphere. We were funded to contribute rate measurements on the dynamics of phytoplankton growth and mortality Read More …
As is commonly observed, biology is permeated by variability. In our laboratory and field work, we are consistently puzzled by the high intra!-specific variability observed amongst clones obtained from one population. One aspect of our work is to quantify the degree of intra-specific variability and to distinguish it from the well known variation amongst species. Read More …
This project, in collaboration with Suzanne Strom (WWU) and her lab, investigates the regulation of Heterosigma akashiwo blooms by protistan predators. H. akashiwo causes fish kills yearly in coastal waters of the Pacific. Food web interactions involving H. akashiwo, a raphidophyte that may have multiple modes of toxicity, are poorly understood. Our study focuses on Read More …
This research investigates planktonic predator-prey interactions by combining studies of microscopic cell-cell interactions and responses with measurement of population growth and consumption rates. We can then embed these empirical observations in a theoretically-motivated model that identifies the linkages between organismal behaviors and their population-level ramifications. The motivation for this study is that although heterotrophic protists Read More …
Our field-work aims to determine how much growth and mortality of plankton contribute to the formation of plankton patches, their persistence, and decline. The experiments are mostly done in a shallow, coastal fjord (East Sound, Orcas Island, Washington), and supplemented with seasonal studies in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. Combining frequent small-boat surveys with laboratory measurements, Read More …
The goal of this research is to develop a mechanistic understanding and predictive capability of the relative importance of biological versus physical processes in driving the magnitude of predation pressure by heterotrophic protists (< 200 µm) on microphytoplankton. Recent work has focused on separating the relative role of temperature and potential prey species composition in Read More …
This project investigates the feeding and behavior of krill along the Antarctic Peninsula using a combination of acoustic, net and novel camera observation tools, paired with shipboard experiments and molecular analyses and is done with collaborators Durbin, Roman, Rynearson and Zhou at the University of Massachusetts. During 2 cruises to the Antarctic Peninsula, the scientists Read More …
Organism movement is fundamental to many ecological processes and often dictates relevant biotic and abiotic encounter rates, particularly for planktonic organisms inhabiting a highly dynamic and heterogeneous habitat. Through the development of new methods, my lab is able to observe the cm-scale population distributions of planktonic organisms in the size range of 5-100 µm and Read More …
