Scientists Urge National Initiative on Microbiomes

Scores of leading scientists have urged the creation of a major initiative to better understand the microbial communities critical to both human health and every ecosystem. In two papers published simultaneously on 28 October 2015 in the journals Science and Nature, the scientists called for a government-led effort akin to the Brain Initiative, a monumental multiyear project intended to develop new technologies to understand the human brain.

“Plants and animals are a patina on the microbial world,” said Margaret J. McFall-Ngai, director of the Pacific Biosciences Research Center (PBRC), is a co-author on both new papers. Each of these communities of microbes can be dizzyingly complex. A single human microbiome can be made up of trillions of microbes divided into thousands of species.

Read more about it in The New York Times.

Governor David Ige commends Project Imua team members

Governor David Ige presented commemorative plaques to Project Imua team members from University of Hawai’i campuses across the state during a recognition ceremony at the State Capitol on October 23. Project Imua (Hawaiian for “to move forward”) is a joint faculty-student enterprise for designing, fabricating and testing payloads. The actual Project Imua Payload that flew into space this past summer was also displayed during the ceremony.

On August 12, 2015 University of Hawaiʻi community college students watched their scientific/engineering payload spin into space when a two-stage Terrier-Improved Malemute sounding rocket was launched from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Project Imua is supported by UH Mānoa, UH’s main Hawaiʻi Space Grant Consortium (HSGC) campus, which provides technical assistance through Hawaiʻi Space Flight Laboratory (HSFL)’s resources and personnel.

Read more about it in the UH System News.

Creating corals that can survive climate change

Keyhole Reef, one of dozens of small reefs rising abruptly from the depths of Kāne‘ohe Bay, is showing troubling signs of stress these days because of climate change. Here and there along the steep face of the reef, clumps of coral have turned stark white. This bleaching means the coral has begun to eject the micro-algae that normally live within its tissues and provide up to 90 percent of the nutrients that coral needs to live.

And that has scientists worried, because similar things are happening in tropical waters around the world. Coral reefs are one of the planet’s keystone habitats, as rich in species as the rain forest. But they’re even more vulnerable to climate change and the warm, acidic ocean conditions it is creating. Yet scientists may be coming up with a way to protect the fragile reefs for the warmer world of the future

Ruth Gates, director of the Hawai‘i Institute for Marine Biology (HIMB), calls the process human-assisted evolution. Last spring, she and Madeleine van Oppen of the Australian Institute for Marine Sciences received a $4 million grant from the family foundation of Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen for a plan to develop strains of coral that will be able to withstand changing ocean conditions.

Read more about it in the Washington Post.

Talking about the 2015 SOEST Open House

Henrieta Dulaiova, associate professor of Geology & Geophysics (G&G), and Cindy Knapman, communications leader at UH Sea Grant (UHSG), discuss the wide range of topics and activities at the 2015 SOEST Open House in this Hawaii News Now video report.

New study explains Monsoon oscillations generated by El Niño

A new research study by a team of climate researchers from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa explains for the first time the source of near-annual pressure and wind changes discovered previously in the Southeast Asian Monsoon system.

The results, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show how the El Niño phenomenon interacts with the annual cycle of solar radiation in the western Pacific to generate a suite of new atmospheric pressure oscillations that affects wind and rainfall patterns in Southeast Asia, one of the densest populated areas on our planet.

There still remain major uncertainties about how the atmospheric circulation and the rainfall patterns over Southeast Asia and the Western Tropical Pacific respond to El Niño conditions, such as the current 2015 event. The new findings by Malte Stuecker and Fei-Fei Jin, from the Department of Atmospheric Sciences (ATMO), and Axel Timmermann from the Department of Oceanography (OCE) and the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) demonstrate that the atmospheric reaction is much more predictable than previously assumed.

Read more about it in the EureakAlert! press release.

Meyer and Holland shares insights on recent tiger shark, eel bites

There have been two shark attacks in one month on O‘ahu — one Saturday 17 October on the windward side and the other on the North Shore less than two weeks before that — making six shark attacks in Hawai‘i so far this year. KHON2 wanted to know how this compares to past years, and shark expert Kim Holland of the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) said the rate of attacks is on a typical pace for what normally happens in Hawai‘i. But Holland didn’t just talk about sharks: He said there are “lots of things in the ocean” that can hurt humans — such as the eel that bit a surfer off Waikiki on Saturday, just hours after the Windward shark attack — and what you do after a rare attack happens is what everyone should know about.

Read more about it and watch the video report at KHON2.

With the recent shark bites occurring around Hawaiʻi, Carl Meyer, assistant researcher at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB), shared some interesting shark facts. Meyer is part of a research team using tracking devices to gain new insights into tiger shark movements in coastal waters around Maui and Oʻahu. The ongoing study provides insights into how these ocean predators swim, eat and live.

Read more about it and watch the tagging video in the UH System News; read more about the seasonality of bites and Hawaiian oral traditions in Ka Lā. and at ABC News (in a report about a boy bitten on the leg on 10-28-15 in the waters off Makaha Beach Park, O‘ahu). Track tagged tiger sharks at the Pacific Islands Ocean Observing System (PacIOOS) Tiger Shark Tracking site.

Studying Lōʻihi gives scientists insight into other Hawaiian volcanoes

The Lōʻihi Seamount, whose summit lies some 3,200 feet beneath the waves nearly 22 miles southeast of Ka‘u, was only discovered in 1952 when a flurry of earthquakes drew scientists’ attention offshore. The earliest known mention of Loihi was on bathymetric charts in 1940. It was given its Hawaiian name, which means “to extend, to be long,” in 1954 by Mary Pukui and Marha Hohuhe of Bishop Museum following an ocean floor survey, but no one seemed to give the underwater mound much thought until 1978, when, after a series of earthquakes, scientists were reminded of its presence and mounted a dredging expedition to explore more about what they thought was faulting under the sea. When the expedition turned up relatively new pillow lava, scientists knew they had something special.

“What distinguishes Lōʻihi from other seamounts in the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain around the Hawaiian Islands is that all the others are dead. Lōʻihi is capable of erupting, and therefore actually a young, emerging Hawaiian volcano, said Geology and Geophysics (G&G) professor of volcanology and Lōʻihi geology expert, Michael Garcia.

Read more about it in West Hawaii Today.

UH Mānoa undergraduate students make discoveries in Hawaiʻi

Original scientific research by two recent graduates from the Global Environmental Science (GES) undergraduate program has shed new light on Hawaiʻi’s past and current natural environment.

Camilla Tognacchini’s senior research project began with the goal to assess how the removal of invasive mangroves affects the health of Heʻeia Fishpond, a 600–800 year old productive fishpond on the windward side of Oʻahu. During the two-month study period, which included a mangrove removal effort, Tognacchini and mentor (oceanography professor Margaret McManus) monitored salinity, water clarity and water movement in the fishpond as well as weather conditions including rainfall, wind speed and direction and atmospheric pressure.

As a GES student, Justin Thayer worked with mentor and oceanography professor Axel Timmermann to evaluate whether the carbon isotopic composition of ʻōhiʻa trees at Hakalau, Mauna Kea, Hawaiʻi could provide a reliable indicator of past climate conditions. Thayer and Timmermann’s work established that ʻōhiʻa may indeed be a window into historical conditions on Mauna Kea.

Read more about it in the UH System News.

Corals worldwide hit by bleaching

From Hawai‘i to Papua New Guinea to the Maldives, coral reefs are bleaching — in so many regions that the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officially declared a global bleaching event on 08 October 2015. The event, the third in recorded history, is expected to grow worse in coming months.

Warm ocean temperatures, linked to climate change and a strengthening El Niño weather pattern, have triggered reefs to expel the algae that colour them. Reefs in parts of the Pacific, the Indian, and the Atlantic oceans have now turned white. By the end of the year, the bleaching could affect more than a third of the world’s coral reefs and kill more than 12,000 square kilometres of them, NOAA estimates.

“The temperatures we’re seeing are anomalies, and have the potential to dramatically impact the integrity of reefs around the world,” says Ruth Gates, director of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB).

Read more about it at NOAA and in Nature News.

Ocean Station ALOHA designated a Milestones in Microbiology site

Ocean Station ALOHA (A Long-term Oligotrophic Habitat Assessment) the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s research site 60 miles north of Oʻahu has been designated a Milestones in Microbiology site by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). ASM Milestones in Microbiology program recognizes institutions and scientists that have made significant contributions toward advancing the microbial sciences.

Since 1988, this open-ocean research station “has played a fundamental role in defining the discipline of microbial oceanography, developing a comprehensive understanding of the sea and educating the public about the critical role of marine microbes in global ecosystems,” ASM officials noted in their citation.

“It soon became a trans-disciplinary collaboration among individuals who traditionally did not interact (microbiologists, physical scientists, oceanographers, mathematicians and educators), and created unique opportunities for scientific discovery, knowledge transfer and outreach to society at large,” said David Karl, Hawaiʻi Ocean Time-series (HOT) co-founder, Victor and Peggy Brandstrom Pavel Professor of Ocean and Earth Science, and director of the Daniel K. Inouye Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE). “Station ALOHA may be viewed as the birthplace of microbial oceanography.”

Read more about the program, and about the events in November in celebration of it, in the UH System News.