ISSUE 31 • JULY 2015

Grant Awards

Jessica Pilarczyk “Environmental impacts of Cyclone Pam on Van-uatu:implications for long term cyclone and tsunami recordings” National Science Foundation $21,750

John Wilkin “Coastal Ocean Mod-eling of Nonlinear Internal-Wave Physical and Acoustic Effects” WHOI $118,500

Kay Bidle “Marine Microbiology Initiative Investigator Award” Gordon and Betty Moore Foun-dation $313,785

Kim Thamatrakoln “Alabama Center for Ecological Resilience (ACER)” Dauphin Island Sea Lab $377,024

Ben Horton “Dating of remote lake sediment core (Surprise Lake)” SNJ-DEP $3,993

Costantino Vetriani “Sentinal Microbes that utilize Carbon Monoxide as Energy and Carbon Source” NASA $90,000

Scott Glenn “Towards a Compre-hensive Mid-Atlantic Regional Association Coastal Ocean Observing System (MARACOOS)” NOAA IOOS $40,000

Rutgers Oceanography

The summer means field work, grant deadlines, and most awesomely summer interns. One group of students we are always proud to host are the students from the US Naval Academy. This year we hosted the largest group of naval summer students to date. Pictured are the five naval academy students (Kelsey Ashbrook, Erin Payne, Olivia Czerewko, Stephanie Lee, Ca-leb Lintz, Martin Arroyo) in uniform upon their arrival to Rutgers with NSF REU and Tele-dyne Webb summer interns (outlined later in this newsletter). The naval students focused on the ongoing RU Challenger mission to travel the global oceans. The Challenger mission is an educational effort and in the summer 2015 a glider was launched from Brazil and is cur-rently half way across the Atlantic in an attempt to reach South Africa. The mission has been endorsed by the Explorer Club which has made it a flagged mission (the flag being held by the students). The students plotted the potential flight paths for the glider through the South Atlantic, compared the predictive skill between the European and American global ocean models against glider and ARGO data. All the students also took part in the annual glider school training them to ballast/prep a glider, write a glider mission, and then act as a glider pilot. Currently the US Navy has the world’s largest glider fleet. RU is number three.

Summer means time in the field and most importantly undergraduate sum-mer interns from around the world on campus

Summer undergraduate REUs grow our Marine Science family over the summer.

The summer REU program brings together leading un-dergraduates from across the United States to conduct original research working in and beside Rutgers faculty, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students. Their original research culminates in a science symposium each summer (picture of the poster session is above).

This year’s internship program offered a summer re-search experience to 11 undergraduate students from colleges and universities throughout the United States. After shared field experiences in the first week in New Brunswick, the Rutgers University Marine Field Station at Tuckerton, and the Haskin Shellfish Research Lab at Bivalve, the students worked with mentors on their own projects and presented their results to all of DMCS and the wider community in a poster session. The winner of the poster contest was Joseph Zottoli (picture below), from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, who was mentored by Paola Lopez-Duarte and Ken Able. His poster was titled “Nursery Habitats for Early-Life Stages of American Horseshoe Crabs in Great Bay-Little Egg Harbor, NJ.” Second place was a tie between Katie Plank, American University, for her study titled “Effects of Oiling on Marsh Food Webs: Fatty Acid and Gut Con-tent Approaches” (mentors Paola Lopez-Duarte and Ken Able) and Francesca Roselli, Rutgers University, for her study titled “Population Biology of Oyster Toadfish in New Jersey Estuaries” (mentor Daphne Munroe). The winning poster will be presented by Joe at the Ocean Sci-ences Meeting in New Orleans in February 2016. The

RIOS program is supported by an REU grant from the National Science Foundation (Gary Taghon and Ken Able, Co-PIs). Thanks are due to all the RIOS students and their research mentors, the intern ‘wranglers’ (Sar-ah Borsetti, Jessica Valenti, and Patrick Flanagan), and all those in New Brunswick, Tuckerton, and Bivalve who contributed to an exciting and fruitful summer.

Special Memorial Issue Celebrating Peter Rona is pub-lished in Deep Sea Research

This special issue grew out of a research symposium cel-ebrating the science and life of Peter Rona. A snapshot of the cover is below.

Rutgers Oceanography

marine.rutgers.edu

The full title of the special issue is: “Exploring New Fron-tiers in Deep-Sea Research: In Honor and Memory of Peter A. Rona”. The special issue contains 22 manuscripts spanning a wide range of topics spanning from the deep-sea to coastal oceanography and ranging from Geophys-ics to Biology. We thank the Guest Editors Richard Lutz and Mike Kennish for the dedication to getting this im-portant contribution finished!

2015 Teledyne-Webb sponsored summer undergraduate interns

Teledyne-Webb Inc. supports two undergraduate in-terns over each of the last 4 summers. This years Tele-dyne-Webb interns were Andrenette Morrison and Liam Ramsay (pictured above during their visit up to Tele-dyne-Webb facility in Massachusetts). Their summer research work was presented at the international Fall Marine Technology Society meetings.

Congratulations Ken Able

Ken Able was the invited keynote speaker to the XV Eu-ropean Congress of Ichthyology in Porto Portugal. As part of the “Life Cycles, Migration and Connectivity” portion of the conference, Ken presented a talk titled “Early life history and habitat ecology of estuarine fishes: Responses to natural and human induced change”.

Congratulations to the new Dr. Jeena Drake

Jeena Drake has completed her PhD. Her work focused on the biophysics, chemistry and physiology of calcifi-cation of corals. The title of her these is “The skeletal proteome and production of calcifying proteins in Stylo-phora pistillata”. Her solid and exciting science is a great example of why Rutgers is a great place to be a young scientist. Below is a picture of Jeena sampling in her nat-ural laboratory.

Rutgers is accepted as full member of POGO

For more than a decade, the Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans, POGO, has served as a forum for leaders of major oceanographic institutions around the world to promote global oceanography, particularly the implementation of international and integrated global ocean observing systems. POGO is an international net-work of collaborators who foster partnerships that ad-vance efficiency and effectiveness in studying and moni-toring the world’s oceans on a global scale.

New PublicationsPérez-Rodríguez, I., Bolognini, M., Ricci, J., Bini, E. and Vetriani, C. 2015. From deep-sea volcanoes to human pathogens: A conserved quorum sensing

signal in Epsilonproteobacteria. ISME J. 9:1222-1234. doi:10.1038/ismej.2014.214.

Norghauer JM, Free CM, Landis RM, Grogan J, Malcolm JR, Thomas SC 2015. Herbivores limit the population size of big-leaf mahogany trees in an Amazonian forest. Oikos. DOI: 10.1111/ oik.02324

Allen, K. A., Sikes, E. L., Barbel, H., Elmore, A. C., Guilderson, T. P., Rosenthal, Y., Anderson, R. F. 2015. Southwest Pacific deep water carbonate chemistry linked to high southern latitude climate and atmospheric CO 2 during the Last Glacial Termination . Quaternary Science Reviews. 122 (2015) 180-191. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2015.05.007

Kourafalou V.H., P. De Mey, M. Le Hénaff, G. Charria, C.A. Edwards, R. He, M. Herzfeld, A. Pascual, E.V. Stanev, J. Tintoré, N. Usui, A.J. van der Westhuysen, J. Wilkin & X. Zhu 2015. Coastal Ocean Forecasting: system integration and evaluation, Journal of Operational Oceanography, 8:supaper, s127-s146, DOI:10.1080/1755876X.2015.1022336

Le Traon P.-Y. , D. Antoine, A. Bentamy, H. Bonekamp, L.A. Breivik, B. Chapron, G. Corlett, G. Dibarboure, P. DiGiacomo, C. Donlon, Y. Faugère, J. Font, F. Girard-Ardhuin, F. Gohin, J.A. Johannessen, M. Kamachi, G. Lagerloef, J. Lambin, G. Larnicol, P. Le Borgne, E. Leuliette, E. Lindstrom, M.J. Martin, E. Ma-turi, L. Miller, L. Mingsen, R. Morrow, N. Reul, M.H. Rio, H. Roquet, R. Santoleri & J. Wilkin 2015. Use of satellite observations for operational oceanog-raphy: recent achievements and future prospects, Journal of Operational Oceanography, 8:supaper, s12-s27, DOI:10.1080/1755876X.2015.1022050

Reiss, P. Grothues, T. W. 2015. Geometric morphometric analysis of cyclical body shape changes in color pattern variants of Cichla temensis Humboldt, 1821 (Perciformes: Cichlidae) demonstrates reproductive energy allocation. Neotropical Ichthyology. 13(1): 103-112. DOI: 10.1590/1982-0224-20140030

GET YOUR RU OCEAN SWAG!!!!Rutgers Oceanography tee-shirts are here. Proudly wear the Rutgers Oceanography tee-shirts - funds are raised to host science socials for the undergraduate and grad-uate students. Tee-shirts go for $15 and will make you look atheltic, smart, and dashing. Such a great deal for a great cause. Contact Sarah Kasule if interested (ka-sule@marine.rutgers.edu). To see the quality people your contribution would support check out our featured graduate students at http://marine.rutgers.edu/main/Featured-Student/.

Please help us enable Rutgers oceanogra-phy to support the next generation!

Rutgers oceanography needs your support to meet the environmental and educational challenges facing the world today. Your support is critical to enabling high risk and high reward research, developing students to be the leaders of tomorrow and bringing the public with our scientists into the ocean. Your private gifts will cre-ate new laboratories, student fellowships, endowments and feed ambitious new programs. Come join us! Even the smallest gifts have huge impacts by getting students out on the water or getting a student to a professional meeting. So please join us explore the world. Go RU!