35 results match your criteria: "Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute[Affiliation]"

Article Synopsis
  • Mollusks, the second most diverse animal phylum, have unclear responses to endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs), which can cause reproductive issues and population declines.
  • In the blue mussel, Mytilus edulis, exposure to EDCs like 17α-ethinylestradiol and ketoconazole was shown to change sex and disrupt gonadal development.
  • A newly developed non-destructive qPCR assay allows researchers to identify the sex of mussels before experiments, aiding in monitoring and understanding the effects of EDCs on mollusk endocrinology.
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Reconstructing river flows remotely on Earth, Titan, and Mars.

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

July 2023

Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139.

Alluvial rivers are conveyor belts of fluid and sediment that provide a record of upstream climate and erosion on Earth, Titan, and Mars. However, many of Earth's rivers remain unsurveyed, Titan's rivers are not well resolved by current spacecraft data, and Mars' rivers are no longer active, hindering reconstructions of planetary surface conditions. To overcome these problems, we use dimensionless hydraulic geometry relations-scaling laws that relate river channel dimensions to flow and sediment transport rates-to calculate in-channel conditions using only remote sensing measurements of channel width and slope.

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A common goal among fisheries science professionals, stakeholders, and rights holders is to ensure the persistence and resilience of vibrant fish populations and sustainable, equitable fisheries in diverse aquatic ecosystems, from small headwater streams to offshore pelagic waters. Achieving this goal requires a complex intersection of science and management, and a recognition of the interconnections among people, place, and fish that govern these tightly coupled socioecological and sociotechnical systems. The World Fisheries Congress (WFC) convenes every four years and provides a unique global forum to debate and discuss threats, issues, and opportunities facing fish populations and fisheries.

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Limited work to date has examined plastic ingestion in highly migratory seabirds like Great Shearwaters () across the their entire migratory range, although this species is prone to ingest plastic as a wide-ranging procellariiform. We examined 217 Great Shearwaters obtained from 2008-2019 at multiple locations spanning their yearly migration cycle across the Northwest and South Atlantic to assess accumulation of ingested plastic as well as trends over time and between locations. A total of 2,328 plastic fragments were documented in the ventriculus portion of the gastrointestinal tract, with an average of 9 plastic fragments per bird.

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Acoustic data were recorded on two vertical line arrays (VLAs) deployed in the New England Mud Patch during the Seabed Characterization Experiment 2017 in about 75 m of water. The sound recorded during the passage of merchant ships permits identification of singular points for the waveguide invariant β for mode pairs (1,n):β,for n=2,3,4,5, in the 15-80 Hz band. Using prior geophysical information and an acoustic data sample from the merchant ship KALAMATA, a geoacoustic model M of the seabed was developed.

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A Robust Observation, Planning, and Control Pipeline for Autonomous Rendezvous with Tumbling Targets.

Front Robot AI

September 2021

Space Systems Laboratory (SSL) and Astrodynamics, Space Robotics and Controls Lab (ARCLab), Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States.

Accumulating space debris edges the space domain ever closer to cascading Kessler syndrome, a chain reaction of debris generation that could dramatically inhibit the practical use of space. Meanwhile, a growing number of retired satellites, particularly in higher orbits like geostationary orbit, remain nearly functional except for minor but critical malfunctions or fuel depletion. Servicing these ailing satellites and cleaning up "high-value" space debris remains a formidable challenge, but active interception of these targets with autonomous repair and deorbit spacecraft is inching closer toward reality as shown through a variety of rendezvous demonstration missions.

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Ciguatera poisoning (CP) poses a significant threat to ecosystem services and fishery resources in coastal communities. The CP-causative ciguatoxins (CTXs) are produced by benthic dinoflagellates including and spp., and enter reef food webs via grazing on macroalgal substrates.

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Coal fly ash is a major carbon flux in the Chang Jiang (Yangtze River) basin.

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

May 2021

Key Laboratory of Surficial Geochemistry, Ministry of Education, School of Earth Sciences and Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China.

Fly ash-the residuum of coal burning-contains a considerable amount of fossilized particulate organic carbon (FOC) that remains after high-temperature combustion. Fly ash leaks into natural environments and participates in the contemporary carbon cycle, but its reactivity and flux remained poorly understood. We characterized FOC in the Chang Jiang (Yangtze River) basin, China, and quantified the riverine FOC fluxes.

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Proteins are critical in catalyzing chemical reactions, forming key cellular structures, and in regulating cellular processes. Investigation of marine microbial proteins by metaproteomics methods enables the discovery of numerous aspects of microbial biogeochemical processes. However, these datasets present big data challenges as they often involve many samples collected across broad geospatial and temporal scales, resulting in thousands of protein identifications, abundances, and corresponding annotation information.

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Dihydrodinophysistoxin-1 Produced by in the Gulf of Maine, USA and Its Accumulation in Shellfish.

Toxins (Basel)

August 2020

Washington State Department of Health Public Health Laboratories, Shoreline, WA 98155, USA.

Dihydrodinophysistoxin-1 (dihydro-DTX1, (M-H) 819.5), described previously from a marine sponge but never identified as to its biological source or described in shellfish, was detected in multiple species of commercial shellfish collected from the central coast of the Gulf of Maine, USA in 2016 and in 2018 during blooms of the dinoflagellate . Toxin screening by protein phosphatase inhibition (PPIA) first detected the presence of diarrhetic shellfish poisoning-like bioactivity; however, confirmatory analysis using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) failed to detect okadaic acid (OA, (M-H) 803.

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The mixotrophic dinoflagellate Dinophysis acuminata is a widely distributed diarrhetic shellfish poisoning (DSP) producer. Toxin variability of Dinophysis spp. has been well studied, but little is known of the manner in which toxin production is regulated throughout the cell cycle in these species, in part due to their mixotrophic characteristics.

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Hydrocarbons released during the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill weathered due to exposure to oxygen, light, and microbes. During weathering, the hydrocarbons' reactivity and lability was altered, but it remained identifiable as "petrocarbon" due to its retention of the distinctive isotope signatures (14C and 13C) of petroleum. Relative to the initial estimates of the quantity of oil-residue deposited in Gulf sediments based on 2010-2011 data, the overall coverage and quantity of the fossil carbon on the seafloor has been attenuated.

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Synechococcus, a genus of unicellular cyanobacteria found throughout the global surface ocean, is a large driver of Earth's carbon cycle. Developing a better understanding of its diversity and distributions is an ongoing effort in biological oceanography. Here, we introduce 12 new draft genomes of marine Synechococcus isolates spanning five clades and utilize ~100 environmental metagenomes largely sourced from the TARA Oceans project to assess the global distributions of the genomic lineages they and other reference genomes represent.

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Monterey Bay, California experiences near-annual blooms of Pseudo-nitzschia that can affect marine animal health and the economy, including impacts to tourism and commercial/recreational fisheries. One species in particular, P. australis, has been implicated in the most toxic of events, however other species within the genus can contribute to widespread variability in community structure and associated toxicity across years.

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Google Haul Out: Earth Observation Imagery and Digital Aerial Surveys in Coastal Wildlife Management and Abundance Estimation.

Bioscience

August 2017

Jerry H. Moxley completed this work during his dissertation at the Duke University Marine Lab, a division of the Nicholas School of the Environment in Beaufort, NC USA. He is currently a research scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, CA USA. Andrea Bogomolni is affiliated with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, in Woods Hole, USA. Mike O. Hammill is affiliated with the Maurice-Lamontagne Institute, in Department of Fisheries and Oceans, in Mont-Joli, Canada. Kathleen M.T. Moore is affiliated with the Marine Mammal Rescue and Research Program, at International Fund for Animal Welfare, in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, USA. Michael J. Polito is affiliated with the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge, USA. Lisa Sette is affiliated with the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies, in Provincetown, USA. W. Brian Sharp is affiliated with the Marine Mammal Rescue and Research Program, at International Fund for Animal Welfare, in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, USA. Gordon T. Waring is affiliated with the Protected Species Branch, retired, at Northeast Fisheries Science Center, in Woods Hole, USA. James R. Gilbert is affiliated with the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Conservation Biology, emeritus, at University of Maine, in Orono, USA. Patrick N. Halpin is affiliated with the Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab, at Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, in Durham, USA. David W. Johnston is affiliated with the Division of Marine Science and Conservation, at Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University Marine Lab, in Beaufort, USA.

As the sampling frequency and resolution of Earth observation imagery increase, there are growing opportunities for novel applications in population monitoring. New methods are required to apply established analytical approaches to data collected from new observation platforms (e.g.

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Whole-organism performance tasks are accomplished by the integration of morphological traits and physiological functions. Understanding how evolutionary change in morphology and physiology influences whole-organism performance will yield insight into the factors that shape its own evolution. We demonstrate that nonmigratory populations of alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus) have evolved reduced swimming performance in parallel, compared with their migratory ancestor.

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Sediments in deep ocean trenches may contain crucial information on past earthquake history and constitute important sites of carbon burial. Here we present C data on bulk organic carbon (OC) and its thermal decomposition fractions produced by ramped pyrolysis/oxidation for a core retrieved from the >7.5 km-deep Japan Trench.

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Marine Cryptophytes Are Great Sources of EPA and DHA.

Mar Drugs

December 2017

Department of Biological and Environmental Science, University of Jyväskylä, P.O. Box 35 (YA), 40014 Jyväskylä, Finland.

Microalgae have the ability to synthetize many compounds, some of which have been recognized as a source of functional ingredients for nutraceuticals with positive health effects. One well-known example is the long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), which are essential for human nutrition. Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) are the two most important long-chain omega-3 (ω-3) PUFAs involved in human physiology, and both industries are almost exclusively based on microalgae.

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Bisphenol A (BPA) is widely used in the manufacture of plastics and epoxy resins and is prevalent in the aquatic environment. BPA disrupts endocrine pathways in fish, but the long-term developmental implications are unknown. We demonstrate that BPA deposition in the eggs of rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss), an ecologically and economically important species of fish, reprograms liver metabolism in the offspring and alters the developmental growth trajectory in two generations.

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is a globally distributed cyanobacterium whose nitrogen-fixing capability fuels primary production in warm oligotrophic oceans. Like many photoautotrophs, serves as a host to various other microorganisms, yet little is known about how this associated community modulates fluxes of environmentally relevant chemical species into and out of the supraorganismal structure. Here, we utilized metatranscriptomics to examine gene expression activities of microbial communities associated with (strain IMS101) using laboratory-maintained enrichment cultures that have previously been shown to harbor microbial communities similar to those of natural populations.

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The large inventory of radioactivity released during the March, 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactor accident in Japan spread rapidly across the North Pacific Ocean and was first observed at the westernmost station on Line P, an oceanographic sampling line extending 1500 km westward of British Columbia (BC), Canada in June 2012. Here, time series measurements of Cs and Cs in seawater on Line P and on the CLIVAR-P16N 152°W line reveal the recent transport history of the Fukushima radioactivity tracer plume through the northeast Pacific Ocean. During 2013 and 2014 the Fukushima plume spread onto the Canadian continental shelf and by 2015 and early 2016 it reached Cs values of 6-8 Bq/m in surface water along Line P.

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The nitrogen (N)-fixing cyanobacterium Trichodesmium is globally distributed in warm, oligotrophic oceans, where it contributes a substantial proportion of new N and fuels primary production. These photoautotrophs form macroscopic colonies that serve as relatively nutrient-rich substrates that are colonized by many other organisms. The nature of these associations may modulate ocean N and carbon (C) cycling, and can offer insights into marine co-evolutionary mechanisms.

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Scleractinian coral are experiencing unprecedented rates of mortality due to increases in sea surface temperatures in response to global climate change. Some coral species however, survive high temperature events due to a reduced susceptibility to bleaching. We investigated the relationship between bleaching susceptibility and expression of five metabolically related genes of Symbiodinium spp.

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Some species of butterflyfish have had preyed upon corals for millions of years, yet the mechanism of butterflyfish specialized coral feeding strategy remains poorly understood. Certain butterflyfish have the ability to feed on allelochemically rich soft corals, e.g.

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Analytical and numerical scattering models with accompanying digital representations are used increasingly to predict acoustic backscatter by fish and zooplankton in research and ecosystem monitoring applications. Ten such models were applied to targets with simple geometric shapes and parameterized (e.g.

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