Higher Organisms
Higher organisms generally make up the animal component of ocean ecosystems - the invertebrates, fishes, and marine mammals. This is an immensely diverse group in body form, life cycle, and ecological function. The group ranges from water-borne animals such as the minute zooplankton adrift in ocean currents to bottom-dwellers such as lobsters, clams, and corals. Unable to produce their own food, all are dependent on some form of primary production, whether it is from phytoplankton in the ocean's well-lit surface waters, or from another form of microbial production in the deep sea.
Bigelow Laboratory's research in this area spans a large range of spatial scales - from mechanisms occurring at the organismal level, to larval transport between far-flung populations, to disentangling the linkages among trophic levels within an ecosystem. Much of the research in this area is directly relevant to fisheries, aquaculture, and the function of coastal ecosystems. At the finest scale, state-of-the-art imaging and neuro-technology is used to determine how zooplankton detect and capture individual food particles such as phytoplankton. Similarly, the goal of electrophysiological studies on the sensory biology of host-detection in parasitic salmon lice seeks to disrupt their ability to locate a host (Fields). Determining how such micro-scale processes "scale up" to the ecosystem level is a central challenge in biological oceanography.
Focused studies on macrotidal estuaries within the Gulf of Maine, for example, are quantifying the pathways and rates of movement of energy and materials through the trophic levels that explain the region's unusually high levels of coastal productivity (Larsen). At the scale of the Gulf of Maine and Atlantic Canada, new benthic sampling protocols developed at Bigelow are enabling us to understand the ocean-atmosphere processes that determine fluctuations in the supply of lobster larvae to coastal nurseries, which in turn will aid the development of forecasting tools for trends in this region's most valuable fishery (Wahle). Furthermore, with new expertise in microbial processes, Bigelow is well positioned to address diseases that afflict fishes and invertebrates, such as vibriois in hatchery and aquaculture species (Wharam) and coral bleaching (Wilson). Advances in biomolecular research is allowing researchers to examine evolutionary adaptation at the cellular level (McClellan) in a variety of organisms ranging from microbes to whales.