EEMB News

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has awarded an $800,000 Science to Achieve Results (STAR) grant to UC Santa Barbara’s Roger Nisbet. He will use the funding to develop a model to better understand biological and ecological consequences of exposure to metals, nanoparticles and certain flame retardants in industrial and consumer products. Such materials could pose a threat to human and environmental health.

A new general consumer-resource model spans the mathematics of a century’s worth of food web models and provides a common foundation for new food webs.

Debora Iglesias-Rodriguez studies the chalk-making phytoplankton that is turning the ocean turquoise in the Santa Barbara Channel.

The octopus has a unique ability. It can change the color, pattern and even texture of its skin not only for purposes of camouflage but also as a means of communication. The most intelligent, most mobile and largest of all mollusks, these cephalopods use their almost humanlike eyes to send signals to pigmented organs in their skin called chromatophores, which expand and contract to alter their appearance.

The common hippopotamus can spend up to 16 hours a day immersed in rivers and lakes. Lumbering out of the water at night, these herbivores graze on tropical grasses and consume 80 to 100 pounds in one meal.

At UC Santa Barbara, the high-tech research greenhouses are more sophisticated than many smart homes. Temperature and lighting are automated to create and maintain specific environmental conditions researchers need for experimental work. For example, when the temperature rises, the sensors in the thermostat signal shade cloths to close in order to modify the amount of sunlight coming into the greenhouse.

Craig Carlson, chair of UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology (EEMB), has received the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Award from the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO). This is the second major award for Carlson, who was honored with the inaugural American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences Early Career Award in 2002.

UC Santa Barbara marine scientists lead a global review of the past and future of wildlife in the oceans.

With a handful of motivated undergrads serving as his assistants, UC Santa Barbara marine scientist Craig Carlson spent part of his summer at sea on the South Pacific, leading the biogeochemical component of a multidisciplinary research cruise aboard the RV Kilo Moana.

For Carlson, professor and chair of UCSB’s Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology (EEMB), such trips are routine. For the students, however, they can be the experience of their college careers.

Complex social organization with caste formation is best known for social insects and naked mole rats. Ana Garcia-Vedrenne's study presented evidence for trematode parasite social organization involving reproductive “Queens” and defensive “soldiers", all clone members, genetically identical. She examined 14 trematode species that infect the California horn snail, Cerithidea californica. Half of these species appear to have a division of labor involving a soldier caste, while the other half provide information on colony structure when soldiers are lacking.