Eastern Boundary Upwelling Ecosystems

New number of Progress in Oceanography with the papers selected from the Symposium "Eastern Boundary Upwelling Ecosystems" held in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in June 2008. This new book about upwelling systems will be another landmark to understand one of the most prominent oceanographic processes in the world. There are two reviews about the Canary Current which are quite interesting for researchers working in the Canary Islands. One about biogeochemistry and fisheries by Arístegui et al., and a second one about ichtyioplankton by Rodríguez et al.

New paper by Yebra et al.

New paper by Lidia Yebra and co-workers in Polar Research. These are the results of zooplankton biomass, vertical distribution and metabolism during the ICEPOS cruise in the Bransfield Strait. Interesting to see that about half of the biomass in Antarctic waters is below 200 m depth. During the last decade, we have been arguing that vertical distribution of mesozooplankton and krill is of paramount importance to understand the flux of carbon in the Antarctic waters. As usual, the paper is available on request.

Welcome to Alejandro

Alejandro Vicente Ariza is a new member of the biological oceanography group. He was born in Almería. He studied biology at Granada University and I arrived three years ago to the Canary Islands to specialize in marine biology at La Laguna University (ULL), Tenerife island. He collaborated during two years with BIOECOMAC, the marine sciences group at the Animal Biology Department of the ULL. He graduated in 2008 and started to work in deep sea research thanks to a join project developed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the ULL. He enjoyed the study of an amazing marine community, the mesopelagic nekton. Now, he moved to Gran Canaria Island to work in the Biology Department of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria University. He is going to work in the LUCIFER project to unveil the secrets of micronekton and the carbon flux due to diel vertical migrants. Good luck!!

Alejandro

Caibex III cruise

Shelf–ocean exchanges in the Canaries–Iberia Large Marine Ecosystem

Today, a short note about the Caibex III cruise performed last August in the upwelling zone of Cape Ghir on board the research vessel "Sarmiento de Gamboa" and leadership by Dr. Javier Arístegui. Caibex is a project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Research and mainly conducted by the University of Las Palmas, the Institute of Marine Sciences of Galicia and the National Institute of Oceanic Research of Morocco. The goal of Caibex is to study at the mesoscale level the flux of energy and matter between the upwelled waters and the oceanic realm. They try to quantify those fluxes and their variability in relation to two upwelling filament systems off Galicia and Morocco. During Caibex III they sampled from bacteria to fish and octopus larvae in the filament off Cape Ghir (see the picture below). They also perform some experiments using drifting buoys equipped with sediment traps and incubation systems for primary production and respiration. Now, they are on the way to process thousands of samples. Good luck!

The sampled area. See the impressive filament off Cape Ghir, some of the oceanographic stations made and the trajectory of the drifting buoys.

The Seasoar used to obtain hydrological profiles underway.

All the orchestra.

New paper

Today, a new paper by Santiago Hernández-León about the functioning of the pelagic ecosystem. The author poses a hypothesis about the role of large predators on the structure of the pelagic food web. Diel vertical migrants promote a predatory pressure over zooplankton. This predation is driven by lunar illumination and therefore is cyclic. The presence or not of mesozooplankton also promotes a cascade effect down food web. Two different scenarios could be observed depending on the presence or not of mesozooplankton. What are the consequences of this top-down effect for the carbon flux? Do not miss this interesting paper. You can find it in your nearest library.

Some interesting papers

Today, some interesting papers recently published. The main author is our colleague Federico Baltar and the co-authors are the real bacterial mafia (Javier Arístegui, Pep Gasol, Gerhard Herndl, Eva Sintes). Compulsory for those working in oceanic microbiology. However, for the general readers inside the biological oceanography group, please look at the figure extracted from the paper published in Limnology and Oceanography. Observe the parallelism between the electron transfer system (ETS) activity and the particulate organic carbon (POC). For those recently joining the blog, read the abstract by double click on the image.

Welcome

After some weeks without news, mainly because of holidays and a long list of duties accumulated, we are here again to give you an account of what is happening with the oceanography mafia of the Marine Science Faculty in the Canary Islands.

Today we give the welcome to our laboratory of biological oceanography to Cynthia Voss and Sandra Wuttke. Cynthia works at the Max Delbrueck Centrum of Molecular Biology in the group of Dr. Ulrike Ziebold. She is here for an internship (14 weeks) in the group of Drs. May Gómez and Ted Packard. The internship is an European project called Leonardo da Vinci Mobilitaetsprojekt. Sandra Wuttke works at the Lise Meitner School in Berlin and she is here for another internship in the group of Dr. Javier Aristegui (14 weeks, same project as Cynthia).

Cynthia J. Voss

Sandra Wuttke