Bigelow scientists from Boothbay have discovered rare signs of climate resilience

The world’s oceans remain 95% uncharted and affect us in ways we may not fully understand. New research from Boothbay-based Bigelow Laboratory confirms this. According to Dr. According to Karen Stamieszkin, lead author of the study, the mysteries don’t start miles below the surface, but on the surface itself.

A team of Boothbay researchers examined 60 years of data (1958–2015) on microscopic plankton in the North Atlantic. In a study published in “Frontiers of Marine Science,” scientists contributed the first watershed-level look at how the distribution of mixotrophs varies, revealing an increase in abundance as the Gulf of Maine warms.

The Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey is operated by the Marine Biological Association. His data proved useful for Stamieszkin’s study.

“The CPR is a 10-year survey designed to collect samples of zooplankton,” Stamieszkin said. “But it also catches large phytoplankton [mixotrophs], and therefore worked well for this study. We found that the data set up in a way that compared mixotrophs and photoautotrophs [diatoms].”

For millennia, scientists thought that organisms could survive by photosynthesis or by directly consuming prey. In the 1900s, they noticed that most marine life does both: mixotrophic organisms change habits as needed—hence their industry nickname, “flexible feeders.”

Stamieszkin found that mixotrophs are most abundant when it’s warm and nutrients are less abundant — conditions that are expected to occur more frequently due to climate change. The study, she said, confirms that the ocean is changing at the molecular level, and because mixotrophs are flexible in how they obtain food, they have resilience to global warming.

The results serve as a springboard for further experiments that examine the impact of mixotrophy on nutrient cycling and predict how marine life will respond to changing environments. Or so the team hopes.

“We didn’t set out to study climate resilience per se, but our findings raise a question,” Stamieszkin said. “Another thought is: If mixotrophs are more resilient than their counterparts, will they replace those at the base of the food web? The last sentence of the article says that the study is meant to initiate further research, and it is. Our work presents new hypotheses that move science forward.”

Stamieszkin explained that if mixotrophs replace the base of the planktonic food web, it will impact all ocean life, including local seafood and endangered right whales, which Maine must federally protect. Additionally, microbial life in the ocean produces half of Earth’s oxygen. Huge changes in the planktonic community would alter the amount of oxygen available for humans to breathe.

The Bigelow Laboratory is involved in the Gulf of Maine North Atlantic Time Series, a separate project that has been collecting data to monitor ocean change since 1998.

“Time series that cover a long time frame and a large space are rare because they are so expensive to finance,” Stamieszkin said. “But they are essential to understanding our changing ocean and its myriad ecosystems.” Marine biotic components such as phytoplankton are responsible for global nutrient cycling; they directly affect human life.”

Barney Balch, Bigelow Research Scientist Emeritus, helped launch the GNATS program.

“The power of long-term series of environmental measurements is to learn and determine the natural variability of your particular system,” Balch said. “Such work is extremely laborious—making hundreds of cruises along the same transect over decades—but one gains tremendous statistical power to reliably assess climate change.”

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