We have been conducting weekly water quality monitoring in the nearshore ocean at Crystal Cove State Park for the past several months. A couple of weeks ago, we decided to assess variability in nutrients, chlorophyll a (a proxy for phytoplankton biomass), pH, and dissolved oxygen over a shorter time-scale. Researchers from the Bracken and Sorte…

Christine Newton-Ramsay, who began her Ph.D. work in the Marine Biodiversity Lab in the Fall of 2011, has completed her Ph.D. in record time! Chris came to our lab with a M.S. from the University of Rhode Island and a solid research plan to conduct work on the invasive seaweed Heterosiphonia (now Dasysiphonia) japonica. She wrote and defended…

This past week brought the first real rainfall in Orange County in about 9 months, and the Orange County Register interviewed Matt Bracken and his colleague Travis Huxman (Director of the Center for Environmental Biology and Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) about effects of the storm on marine and terrestrial ecosystems, respectively. Travis highlighted…

In a paper just published online in Oikos, my colleagues and I evaluate the effects of experimental nitrogen and phosphorus additions on internal nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations and show that (1) adding a particular nutrient generally enhances its internal concentration in primary producers and (2) overall, there is no reduction in the concentration of one…

With the start of the new academic year, we welcome two new members to the lab: Laura Elsberry joins us as a Ph.D. student, and Genevieve Bernatchez joins us as an Assistant Specialist. Laura recently completed her M.S. in marine biology at Cal State Fullerton, where she worked on seaweed physiology across tide-height and latitudinal gradients.…

This month, Matt and Cascade are living, researching, and teaching in Sitka, Alaska as Science in Residency Fellows (SIRF) at the Sitka Sound Science Center. While here, we are conducting an experiment to look at effects of multiple aspects of climate change, including warming and ocean acidification, in local marine communities, and conducting a variety of…

The Biodiversity Lab represented UCI and the Center for Environmental Biology at last Saturday’s Estuary Awareness Day at the Back Bay Science Center. We developed an interactive demo to illustrate how adding carbon dioxide to seawater reduces the pH and discussed the impacts of ocean acidification on marine organisms and ecosystems.

In a new paper, published online today in Biological Invasions, Natalie Low and several colleagues from the Marine Biodiversity Lab highlight several reasons why the seaweed Heterosiphonia japonica is such a successful invader, including a higher nitrate uptake efficiency and growth rate than native species and a lower rate of consumption by a native herbivore (Low et al.…

Yesterday, we learned that not one, but two Marine Biodiversity Lab articles have been featured on the cover of the journal issues in which they appear. Val Perini’s work on nitrogen-mediated phosphorus uptake in seaweeds is featured on the cover of the June issue of Oecologia (Perini and Bracken 2014), and work by Rebecca Best on invertebrate responses to…