The Lightning of Catatumbo

January 2, 2013

achartmann Scientists in action , , , , Leave a comment

Catatumbo photo 1

As I shovel myself out of a snowstorm in the northeast I thought I would pass along a story I wrote recently about a warm place far far away. I used my research experience on Curaçao to delve into the complex interactions between coral reefs and people. In the piece I let my creative side run, which I hope makes the content interesting and easy to digest.

Click here to read: The Lightning of Catatumbo

As a side note, some of you may have noticed that Science Minded has been on a hiatus. Unfortunately, research and teaching has consumed my blogging time over the past couple of months, but now that 2013 has come I’ll start posting again. I’ll also be enacting a number of improvements to Science Minded so look for more news soon. Thank you for your continued support and I hope you all have had a safe and happy holiday season.

All the best,

Aaron

Blending art and science

September 3, 2012

achartmann Kids in science, Scientists in action, Tips for young scientists , , , , Leave a comment

Editor’s note: This week, Aaron Hartmann is preparing for coral spawning in the Caribbean. He arranged for a guest post from Nayantara Jain, a masters student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.

When I was in high school, I thought science was all about memorizing the order of elements I would never see, figuring out the difference between direct and alternating currents and finding the boiling points of random liquids.

In a physics class once, I was asked to find the boiling point of one such highly-flammable liquid – toluene – and I nearly set my hand on fire. I ran out with a test tube ablaze in my hand. I doused the flame in the toilet outside and never fully entered a lab again.

More than ten years after that unfortunate incident I find myself in a masters program at Scripps.

I have always thought of myself as a humanities sort of person. I never even liked to be referred to as a “social sciences” student, because I thought philosophy – which was the focus of my bachelor’s degree – was about the mind and analytical thought rather than some method-based science involving hypothesis, lab experiments and disproving with a margin of statistical uncertainty.

This was my error, and I think many people share the same. So what changed?

Curiosity. It may have killed the cat, but it gave birth to a scientist. A series of events after my undergraduate degree led to me living and working as a scuba diving instructor in the Andaman Islands. Inspired by the beauty around me, my writing flourished.

I wrote about the different fish I’d see, about interesting dives, about amusing guests I encountered. I worked for a year assisting biologists collecting underwater data at an island ecology research base called the Andaman & Nicobar Environmental Team, and I began asking questions.

I wondered why nudibranches were so colourful. I wondered why the coral was dying in some places but thriving in others. I wondered why sometimes the ocean was murky, and why sometimes the currents were strong. I wondered why the surface was sometimes still as glass, and sometimes frothing and rough. I realized that the questions inspired art, and that the answers were found in science.

So I applied to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD, where scientists were answering questions like mine. I arrived in San Diego only the night before my program began. Compared to a remote island with no running water, scarce electricity and sporadic dial-up internet, San Diego was an enormous change.

And yet what scared me most was not any of the lifestyle changes, but the fact that I was about to be surrounded by, compared to and working with scientists. I had a picture of science in my head, I guess, and while I wanted to know what they did, I was still wary.

What did I find? I found that science was all about finding out more about what you loved. I met a surfer doing a doctoral work on waves. I met a long-haired professor who has the most intriguing coral facts and looks just like a fellow diving instructor (missing only a tan).

I met a guy who has the immensely envious job of flying a small aircraft low over the ocean to photograph whales. I met a professor who tells the most beautiful stories about how life diversified, and knows more about worms than I thought there was to know.

I went on research ships where I held fish that had been brought up from thousands of metres under the sea and saw mola-molas and dolphins and whales at the surface.

The first time I looked under a microscope I saw a teeny-tiny little crustacean, replete with all his arms and legs and organs and colours. When I picked him out of the petridish with tweezers he looked no different than a grain of sand. Yet here he was, from hundreds of meters below the surface, a fully functioning living being with stories of his own to tell.

Stories — one of the main reasons why I am here. I think for every question that is thought of while looking at something dramatic in nature, there is a story waiting to be told. And the best stories are fantastical ones, based on true life. So while I am not quite ready to trade in my pen and my creativity for a Bunsen burner and a data chart, science is helping me bridge the gap between fact and fantasy.

I am working on an educational app for children, where different reef fish will talk to them about their lives, their habits and their threats. I write a blog where I hope to share lessons about life from the deep. I intend to go back to teaching people to scuba dive – and to teach in a way that introduces not only the colourful sights of the sea, but also its deep mysteries.

Science is not about absent-minded, grey-haired, short-trousered professors looking at obscure particles and measuring them in units we’ve never heard of. Well, at least, it’s not all about them.

It is also about incredible creatures, adaptations to extreme conditions, winds, storms, oceans and the atmosphere in which we all live and must all protect. And this is what I hope most to share.

Hope for coral reefs

August 22, 2012

achartmann Scientists in action , , , , , 1 Comment

Next week I’m returning to the island of Curaçao for the final field research season of my Ph.D. The trip will mark my fifth fall spent in the southern Caribbean, as well as my fifth time rearing baby corals to better understand what makes these unique animals tick.

The island has become a second home to me, and one that I’ve grown to appreciate deeply. Curaçao is perhaps more industrialized and built up than other Caribbean islands, but its pockets of great beauty make it the gem that it is. This perspective, though, may even better depict the state of the island’s coral reefs: patches of magnificence.

In early July I attended the 10th International Coral Reef Symposium in Cairns, Australia. This coming together of coral reef scientists happens once every four years and provides a venue to assess the health of the ecosystem on a global scale. Most of the news was dire: reefs are declining throughout the world and it’s largely the result of human activities like pollution and climate change.

Retired SIO professor Dr. Jeremy Jackson was awarded the Darwin Medal for lifetime achievement and during his acceptance speech he presented preliminary results from a compilation of all the available data for the number of live corals throughout the world.

His message was that all hope isn’t lost. Despite what Caribbean-wide averages suggest, vestiges of reefs abundant with corals still exist. And Curaçao, the data show, is one such place.

In addition to sheer numbers, Jeremy spoke of variability in coral abundance, imploring scientists to consider reef health at the scale of islands rather than ocean basins. By not considering islands on their own we miss the greatest conservation successes and the worst failures, he argued, going on to say that locales can be fundamentally different from one another for reasons that are natural in addition to human-induced. In other words, natural conditions as well as the human footprint make certain places good or bad for corals.

My colleagues and I are taking Jeremy’s advice one step farther. When we look among the many reefs of Curaçao we find that the number of live corals varies dramatically reef-to-reef—some are teeming with life while others are graveyards. The crown jewels are the reefs of Easpoint, a sixteen-mile stretch of untouched chaparral wrapping the eastern tip of the island. Offshore live more corals than anywhere else on the island and their abundance more than triples the Caribbean-wide average.

Eastpoint has become the focus of my dissertation work both because of its great health as well as the growing risk to that health. Land ownership may change hands there, allowing the area to be developed and likely bringing with it many of the human-caused ills that have led to the demise of other reefs.

Efforts to conserve Eastpoint are alive, though, and one of my contributions is to add to a growing body of knowledge explaining why this area is so stunning. My colleagues and I are finding that certain species of coral produce more babies at Eastpoint than at other reefs. This not only bolsters local communities but it likely reseeds ailing reefs at other sites.

The larval phase, when corals are babies, is the only period during which these animals can move, much like seeds of trees. But instead of being pushed by the wind, coral larvae are pushed by water currents, drifting with the sea until they find a place to settle down. As the fates would have it, currents consistently push water east to west along Curaçao, rendering every other reef on the island down current from Eastpoint’s seemingly abundant supply of offspring.

So in Curaçao we see a positive synergy of what Jackson described as the factors controlling coral vitality: nature and humanity. Eastpoint is vibrant and healthy in the absence of people and its physical location is of great fortune for the island as a whole, holding on as a shining example of the hope that still exists for Caribbean coral reefs.

Photo: © Paul Selvaggio

Mentors play critical role

May 13, 2012

achartmann Scientists in action , , , Leave a comment

One of the lesser-known facts about grad school is that much of what we learn doesn’t necessarily come from professors or reading scientific papers. While both are critical to our education, other grad students also provide a wealth of information and support.

During my first year at Scripps I was required to jump into a research project. I hadn’t chosen adissertation topic, but I knew that I wanted to continue to mix biology, chemistry and geology as I had done in undergrad. It wasn’t long before I realized that corals suited my interests well, being that they’re an animal, “plant” and rock all wrapped in one.

This led me to another grad student named Jessica Carilli who was using geology and chemistry to study how corals react to changes in their environment. To conduct her research Jess was examining skeleton cores that she’d collected from boulder-shaped corals in Belize and Honduras.

Similar to a tree, corals grow a new band of skeleton each year. But the skeleton records much more than just the corals’ age. By measuring element concentrations and taking X-rays of the cores, Jess determined the temperature of the sea, the level of metal pollutants, and how frequently severe bleaching had occurred throughout the lifetime of individual colonies.

When we met, Jess was nearing the end of her dissertation and her only regret was that there just wasn’t enough time to ask the many questions that her cores could potentially answer. So after hearing about my interests, she was excited to take me under her wing and learn more from her samples.

Jess taught me how to make elemental measurements and helped me interpret my findings. She had also collected some complimentary data, and when we put it all together the project got much stronger. At the end of my first year I wrote about our joint work in a paper, along with the help of a few other researchers, and it became the first chapter of my dissertation.

Three years later, I found myself deep into my primary dissertation work in Curaçao. While I enjoyed my first year project, I had since become excited about reef ecology, and in particular, how the health of baby corals influences future generations. To investigate my new research topic I had turned to a different technique: measuring fats in coral to see how much energy they store in their tissue.

Meanwhile, Jess had graduated and taken up a postdoc position in Australia. There, she and collaborator Simon Donner of the University of British Columbia, were looking for bleaching events in skeletal cores collected from corals in the Pacific. In addition to looking into each coral’s past using techniques from Jess’ dissertation, they wanted to know the current health of the animals. To do this they turned to fat measurements, and because of the work I was already doing they turned to me.

The gist of what we found—combining all three of our areas of expertise—is that when the sea heats up, corals used to living in places where the temperature varies a lot bleach less than those used to a constant-temperature ocean, presumably because they’re better at tolerating high temperatures.

All in all, my relationship with Jess has gone from mentor to collaborator. As is the case throughout the world of science, we’ve figured out how to draw on each other’s now different skills, utilizing our individual strengths in order to solve nature’s puzzles.

Dissertation comes slowly into focus

April 30, 2012

achartmann Tips for young scientists , , , 1 Comment

Friends and family often ask me what it means to be a Ph.D. student. Some wonder if it’s just more years of classes, while others think it involves a lot of teaching. While both are part of it, a Ph.D. is at its core all about our research.

At the end of five, six or even seven years of grad school, all of our research goes into a dissertation. The document can be more than 100 pages in length and is broken up into chapters, each detailing individual projects that we conducted. In the end, the quality of our dissertation is used to decide whether we’ve achieved the knowledge necessary to be called a “Dr.”

When I started grad school, I had little idea what my dissertation topic would be. I had many interests: microbial geochemistry, tropical aquaculture, and coastal pollution, along with a background in biology. But none of the topics excited me enough on their own, nor were they easy to connect.

Thankfully, my mind was put to ease from the get-go. Before I even applied to Scripps a professor here gave me some great advice: Don’t come into grad school thinking you’ve got your topic figured out. There are things that you will learn here that you didn’t know existed.

He was essentially saying that grad school is a process of intellectual growth—your knowledge will grow, and your dissertation will come into focus and continuously improve as you learn new things.

In my first year at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, I helped on a project looking at pollutants in Venice lagoon sediments (Italy that is), and then studied skeletal isotopes in corals collected from small islands in the Caribbean.

Both of these projects utilized my background in geochemistry and I liked the opportunity to dig my hands into familiar territory. But I wasn’t getting my hands dirty enough. While I was studying samples that came from incredible places, I wasn’t the one out there designing the research and working in the field.

My first opportunity to visit Curaçao came in my second year. While there I assisted with on-going projects and performed small experiments of my own. My early research question was somewhat rudimentary: how do coral babies react to fertilizer? But as I kept going back to the island, trying new things and asking new questions, my work became more refined.

The health of baby coral piqued my interest and I began throwing ideas around with my colleagues on the island and at Scripps. I wondered whether healthy adult corals make health babies, and whether health babies are better able to tolerate polluted environments. As my excitement, knowledge and experience grew, my dissertation topic came into focus.

Many professors I’ve spoken with lament the fact that some students enter grad school highly focused on one area of research, but they also fear the student who jumps from project to project. From my experience, it seem that there are no true rules for picking a topic—be it a senior or masters thesis, or a Ph.D. dissertation. It’s really about keeping an open mind, finding something that interests you, and seeing it through to the end.

Marine biologist stays dry

April 30, 2012

achartmann Tips for young scientists , , Leave a comment

I’m a tropical marine biologist but I don’t SCUBA dive. Sound crazy?

While true, it’s not the whole story. I am not allowed to SCUBA dive. Knowing my medical history of heart and lung issues my doctors think it’s too risky. But even when I take the time to explain this to people, some still scoff.

“Aaron, how do you think you can work with corals if you can’t dive? I just don’t understand,” a professor from another university once asked.

“You don’t dive?” A tourist once exclaimed while in Curaçao on a dive vacation. “That makes no sense,” she laughed. “What are you thinking?”

While their comments stung, I’ve learned to smirk them away because I can confidently tell them: I make it work, and it’s not even that hard.

Their questions are practical, I suppose—the animals I study live in water that’s at least ten feet deep, so I can’t very well collect them or run experiments in their natural habitat. But my naysayers forget one key thing: science is collaborative; I don’t have to be the one dropping below the surface.

To get past my limitation I’ve linked up with two highly skilled SCUBA diving scientists, Kristen Marhaver and Mark Vermeij, who make the collections necessary for me to do my work—or better said: to do our work.

Conducting research as a group is the norm, not the exception. When people bring different expertise and ideas together the outcome can be bigger than the sum of the parts. In other words, cool things happen.

While it’s rare for a team member to be medically barred from completing part of a project, it’s common for individuals to have certain skills and lack others. That’s the whole point of working together, and this is true in just about every field of science.

Kristen and Mark are much more than expert divers, they’re coral reef ecologists. Through sharing their expertise with me, the three of us have discovered some really interesting things about what make corals tick. But our work wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t contribute.

At the field station in Curaçao I set up complex aquarium systems, collect and rear baby corals, run experiments and take samples. I then process the samples and analyze data back in San Diego. While Kristen and Mark taught me some of the techniques we use, many others I’ve learned, practiced and developed on my own.

Looking back, I wouldn’t say that I had an unusually large amount of determination or perseverance, I just believed in what I was doing and wanted to keep doing it.

Many of us have experienced someone telling us that we aren’t capable of something. Just like how I was told to forget marine biology, people may have said you can’t do something because you’re a girl, a boy, a C student, too short, too tall, and on and on.

What matters is how you respond. And I don’t mean in that moment—my encounters with naysayers left me angry and venting to friends afterward—I mean in the long-term. I could have let their comments get to me and turned away from studying corals, but I didn’t.

In many ways I was lucky to link up with Mark and Kristen: they’re great at what they do and welcomed me in as mentors and friends. But none of it would have happened had I not first proved myself as a scientist and hard worker. They didn’t offer me the opportunity on a whim, I had to work hard to build our collaboration, excelling at what I could do and accepting what I couldn’t.

Corals feel the heat, and cold

April 30, 2012

achartmann Scientists in action , Leave a comment

While Melissa Roth has explored coral reefs in some of the most exotic places on earth, she made her first major discovery about coral right down the hall from our lab in San Diego, hundreds of miles from the closest reef.

Melissa, a former lab mate of mine at SIO, looked at how changes in water temperature affect the relationship between coral and the algae that live in their tissue.

As I described in my YouTube video, these algae release molecules they make through photosynthesis as food for the coral while getting protection in return. Usually the pair is quite content, but when the environment changes their breakup can be catastrophic.

Changes in seawater temperature throw off algal photosynthesis, creating chemicals that harm the coral host. During the fight that ensues, these tiny food factories either exit on their own or are kicked out, leaving the coral pale or white in a phenomenon called “bleaching.” After losing its favorite restaurant, coral have to live off stored fat and any food their short tentacles can grab from the water. But this solution is temporary, to survive the coral and algae must reunite.

Climate change is predicted to increase the frequency of both warm and cold events — not just uniformly warm the oceans. While coral-algae breakups commonly occur when waters warm, scientists know little about what happens when their environment cools. This is what Melissa hoped to uncover, specifically by examining the fight that breaks out when temperatures are changed in each direction.

Since most coral are tropical, none of the beautiful reef-building species Melissa wanted to study live in our temperate waters off of California. To solve this problem she and another researcher in our lab, Dimitri Deheyn, conducted an experiment in the SIO experimental aquarium using specimens donated by the Birch Aquarium at Scripps. In addition to saving time and money, the facility’s fine-tuned system allowed them to precisely raise and lower the water temperature, which can be difficult to do in the tropics.

Melissa and Dimitri found that cooler waters were worse for the corals at first — their growth slowed dramatically, algal photosynthesis went out of whack, and many of the algae were lost. But a few days later, the corals in the cool water began to acclimate—photosynthetic functioning improved and the coral’s growth rates slowly increased.

In contrast, the corals in the warm water were alright for the first few days before going rapidly downhill. Photosynthesis all but failed, most of the algae were lost and many corals stopped growing.

The researchers described what they found in a recent paper. Their general conclusion was that while temperature changes in both directions are stressful for corals, they’re better equipped to deal with short bouts of warm water than cool. But in the long-term, warm water is worse for them.

These findings can help scientists better understand and predict how corals living in different parts of the world will respond to increasing climate variability, in particular when considering the length of time that warm and cold events last.

Melissa’s Ph.D. research at SIO concluded in 2010 and she moved on to a postdoctoral position at UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Many of the specimens she studied still live in the SIO experimental aquarium today where Dimitri and myself continue to look after them.

Melissa hopes to eventually become a professor and lead her own lab, continuing to examine how corals are harmed by climate change, while helping uncover ways to increase their chances of survival for future generations.

For a more detailed explanation of their findings, check out this blog poston the New York Times or this video of Dimitri on CBS 8.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 86 other followers