Over the past days, my posts have explored different ways ecologists study life: traits, long-term ecological research, meta-analyses, and imaging methods. Each one showed me a different angle on biodiversity. Now, I want to introduce metabarcoding which adds a...
Before today’s class I always had it in mind that the only beneficial organisms in the ocean are the bigger animals. Never have I thought that tiny microbes in the ocean actually carry such a role in carbon fixation. The interactions between microbes and...
Marine microbes are central to the ocean’s role in regulating Earth’s carbon balance. Through the lens of ecological physiology, we can examine how these organisms respond to environmental conditions while driving essential biochemical processes. From sunlit surface...
The journey of carbon in the ocean begins with phytoplankton, which capture carbon dioxide and convert it into organic matter such as glycans. These glycans then become a key link in the system, transferring carbon to microbial communities. Microbes process this...
Today’s lesson felt like opening the black box of the ocean’s carbon engine, a world where phytoplankton, glycans, and marine fungi quietly shape the fate of carbon across entire ocean basins. We explored a central debate in marine biogeochemistry: Is most carbon...
