Humans are modifying marine food webs both from the top-down, by reducing consumer abundances, and from the bottom-up, by adding nutrients to coastal habitats. Predicting these impacts is complicated because herbivores affect primary producers both from the top-down, by eating them, and from the bottom-up, by recycling nutrients and facilitating the recruitment of algae into local…

We’ve been busy in the Bracken Lab, with six new papers out this year. They include a meta-analysis evaluating the effects of warming experiments on biodiversity (Gruner et al. 2017), a study quantifying the effects of an invasive seaweed on community structure and ecosystem functioning (Ramsay-Newton et al. 2017), a paper highlighting the neglected importance…

More stuff washed up on Orange County beaches last week: the stretch of sand just north of the Newport Pier was carpeted with little bean clams (Donax gouldii) last Wednesday. By Thursday, most of the clams had re-buried in the sand, but Matt went out to take a look and chatted with reporters from CBS…

These funny little squishy, translucent blobs washed up on Orange County beaches earlier this week, prompting interest and alarm from local beachgoers. After much head scratching and a few wrong turns (nope, they are not salps), Matt and others figured out that they were burrowing sea cucumbers: absolutely harmless, intriguing, and super-cute. Matt was interviewed by and…

Congratulations to Kylla Benes! Kylla successfully defended her dissertation today, giving a fantastic presentation about her work to understand intraspecific variation in the seaweed Fucus vesiculosus along tide-height gradients along the coastline of the Gulf of Maine. She melded genetics, physiology, and field experiments to tell a compelling story about how environmental context and dispersal mediate…

Newly published research by graduate student Kylla Benes highlights the role of tidal elevation and nutrient availability in mediating nitrate uptake by the intertidal seaweed Fucus vesiculosus. In her paper, just out online in the Journal of Phycology, Kylla reports on observations and experiments that describe how acclimation and adaptation to differences in nitrate availability associated with tide height…

Congratulations to Ph.D. student Laura Elsberry! Laura was recently named a member of the inaugural cohort of UCI OCEANS graduate fellows. She received funding to support her research on understanding seaweed species distributions along the California coast.

Tide pools, like the ones at Corona del Mar State Beach on the Orange County coast, are ideal places to study marine biology. They hold water when the tide is out, allowing animals and marine “plants” – seaweeds and microscopic algae – to live in an otherwise inhospitable environment. The Marine Biodiversity Lab, led by Associate…

Our research on warming and CO2 effects in tide pools has just been published in PLoS ONE (Sorte and Bracken 2015). In the paper, we show that warming enhances net community production, but that adding CO2 cancels this increase. Our study, the first field experiment to factorially manipulate warming and CO2 addition in a marine…