Culturing planktic foraminifera on Catalina IslandI've had 6 extended field seasons on Catalina Island culturing planktic foraminifers. During my first field season (2011), my goal was simple: collect deep dwelling planktic foraminifers using a plankton net and get them to survive, grow, and complete their life cycle in the laboratory. We had great success getting the deep dwellers N. dutertrei and N. pachyderma to grow in culture during our first culture season in 2011 despite the fact that the culture conditions were designed for warmer, shallower species. After that first season, I was funded (with Ann Russell and Tessa Hill at UC Davis) to continue lab culture projects of the deeper dwelling species, concentrating our efforts at both the Catalina Island and at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory (the Bodega project was lead by Dr. Catherine Davis for her PhD research). We also investigated controls on trace element variability in both spinose and non-spinose species (e.g. what controls Mg/Ca banding and other sub-micron scale heterogeneity).
More recently, my group returned to the Wrigley Marine Science Center to do some genetics, microbiome, and MicroCT studies (2022 field season) and culture forams under high CO2 conditions (800 ppm - sort of worst case climate warming) scenarios, fix the forams as they are building chambers, and use transcriptomics to identify proteins and genes that are up or down regulated during warmer higher CO2 conditions. This project was funded by a NERC-NSF grant with Clare Bird (U of Stirling - Lead PI) Read about some of the culture projects, that included:
Below are some images of the deep dwellers captured in 2011. Additional pictures from the summer of 2014 and 2015 are posted in the blog. Learn about our Taiwan field projects HERE. Learn about our Coastal Oregon projects HERE. |
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