1.8.21

To reflect, or not to reflect, that is the question

Jen stops to take a photo while conducting fieldwork in the Arctic.

The activities are as follows:

Since 1978, satellites have measured changes in Arctic sea ice extent, or the area by the North Pole covered by ice. Observations show that Arctic sea ice extent change throughout the year. Arctic sea ice reaches its smallest size at the end of summer in September. Scientists who look at these data over time have noticed the sea ice extent in September has been getting smaller and smaller since 1978. This shocking trend means that the Arctic sea ice is declining, and fast! 

Why does this matter? Well, it turns out that Arctic sea ice plays a major role in the world’s climate system. When energy from the Sun reaches Earth, part of the energy is absorbed by the surface, while the rest is reflected back into space. The energy that is absorbed becomes heat, and warms the planet. The amount of energy reflected back is called albedo.

The higher the albedo, the more energy is reflected off a surface. Complete reflection is assigned a value of 1 (100%) and complete absorption is 0 (0%). Lighter colored surfaces (e.g., white) have a higher albedo than darker colored surfaces (e.g., black). Sea ice is white and reflects about 60% of solar energy striking its surface, so its albedo measurement is 0.60. This means that 40% of the Sun’s energy that reaches the sea ice is absorbed. In contrast, the ocean is much darker and reflects only about 6% of the Sun’s energy striking its surface, so its albedo measurement 0.06. This means that 94% of the Sun’s energy that reaches the ocean is absorbed.

Jen (second from left) preparing to teach her students at the University of Colorado Boulder while working in the Arctic. Photo by Polar Bears International.

Jen first became interested in sea ice in the summer of 2007, when a record low level of sea ice caught scientists off guard. They worried that if the albedo of the Arctic declines, energy that used to be reflected by the white ice will be absorbed by the dark oceans and lead to increased warming. At the time, Jen was working with new satellite observations and found it fascinating to understand what led to the record low sea ice year. To continue her passion, Jen joined a team of scientists studying the Arctic’s energy budget. 

Jen and her team predicted that the decline in the light-colored sea ice will cause Arctic albedo to decrease as well. Jen used incoming and reflected solar energy data to determine the changes in the Arctic’s albedo. These data were collected from satellites as part of the Clouds and Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) project. Then, Jen compared the albedo data to changes in the extent of sea ice from satellite images to look for a pattern. 

Featured scientist: Jen Kay from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. Written by Jon Griffith with support from AGS 1554659 and OPP 1839104.

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 9.6

1.8.21

Fertilizer and fire change microbes in prairie soil

Christine collecting samples from the experimental plots to measure root growth.
Christine collecting samples from the experimental plots to measure root growth.

The activities are as follows:

Stepping out into a prairie feels like looking at a sea of grass, with the horizon evoking a sense of eternity. Grasses and other prairie plants provide important benefits, such as creating habitat for many unique plants, mammals, insects, and microbes. They also help keep our water clean by using nutrients from the soil to grow. When plants take up these nutrients, they prevent them from going into streams. High levels of plant growth also keeps carbon bound up in the bodies of plants instead of in the atmosphere.  

Prairies grow where three environmental conditions come together – a variable climate, frequent fires, and large herbivores roaming the landscape. However, prairies are experiencing many changes. For example, people now work to prevent fires, which allows forest species to establish and eventually take over the prairie. In addition, a lot of land previously covered in prairie is now being used for agriculture. When land is used for agriculture, farmers add nutrients through fertilizer. With all these changes, prairie ecosystems have been declining globally. Scientists are concerned that as they disappear so will the benefits they provide. 

Lydia and Christine are two scientists contributing to the effort to learn more about how to preserve prairies. They both became interested in studying soil because of their appreciation for prairies at a young age. For Lydia, she lived in an area that was covered by trees and farmland, but knew at one time it used to be prairie. This made her want to learn more about prairie environments and how places like where she grew up have changed through history. For Christine, she grew up surrounded by prairies where she developed a passion and curiosity for the natural world. Especially for the organisms living in the soil that you cannot see, called microbes. 

These are two different experimental plots within the large field experiment at Konza Prairie Biological Station. The one with lots of trees is an unburned plot, the one with lots of grass is a burned plot.
These are two different experimental plots within the large field experiment at Konza Prairie Biological Station. The one with lots of trees is an unburned plot, the one with lots of grass is a burned plot.

Lydia and Christine read about how grassland scientists have been doing research to learn more about what happens when fire is stopped and excess nutrients are added. These changes reduce biodiversity and affect which species of plants can grow in the prairie. However, Lydia and Christine noticed that the research had been mostly focused on what happens aboveground.  Lydia and Christine had a hunch that the aboveground communities were not the only things changing. They thought that belowground components would be changed by fire and fertilizer too. They turned their focus to microbes in the soil, because they also use nutrients. In addition, they thought these microorganism would be affected by the changes in aboveground plant biodiversity. 

To see if this was true, they used data that they and other scientists collected at Konza Prairie Biological Station from a large field experiment. The experiment was set up in 1986 and the treatments were applied at the field site every year until 2017! Lydia and Christine focused on the fertilizer (nitrogen) addition and prescribed burning treatments to answer their questions. The nitrogen treatment had eight plots where nitrogen had been added and eight with no nitrogen as a control. Similarly, the prescribed burn treatment was applied to eight plots, while eight plots had no burning as a control. These two treatments were also crossed with each other, meaning that some plots were burned and nitrogen was added.

Lydia and Christine expected the types of microbes in the soil to change in response to the nitrogen and burning treatments because of the different aboveground plant communities and difference in soil nutrients. Soil microbial communities can change in multiple ways. First, the number of unique species can increase or decrease, measured as richness. The other way is how many individuals of each species there are in the community, measured as evenness. Taken together, richness and evenness give a measure of diversity, which can be summarized using the Shannon-Wiener index. The value will get bigger if either richness or evenness increases because it incorporates both. For example, a community with five species that has equal abundance of each will have a larger Shannon-Wiener index than a community with five species where one species has a lot more individuals than the other four.  

Featured Scientists: Lydia Zeglin and Christine Carson from the Konza Prairie Biological Station. Written By: Jaide Allenbrand

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 10.4

12.10.20

Mangroves on the move

mangrove in marsh
A black mangrove growing in the saltmarshes of northern Florida.

The activities are as follows:

All plants need nutrients to grow. Sometimes one nutrient is less abundant than others in a particular environment. This is called a limiting nutrient. If the limiting nutrient is given to the plant, the plant will grow in response. For example, if there is plenty of phosphorus, but very little nitrogen, then adding more phosphorus won’t help plants grow, but adding more nitrogen will. 

Saltmarshes are a common habitat along marine coastlines in North America. Saltmarsh plants get nutrients from both the soil and the seawater that comes in with the tides. In these areas, fertilizers from farms and lawns often end up in the water, adding lots of nutrients that become available to coastal plants. These fertilizers may contain the limiting nutrients that plants need, helping them grow faster and more densely.

One day while Candy, a scientist, was out in a saltmarsh in northern Florida, she noticed something that shouldn’t be there. There was a plant out of place. Normally, saltmarshes in that area are full of grasses and other small plants—there are no trees or woody shrubs. But the plant that Candy noticed was a mangrove. Mangroves are woody plants that can live in saltwater, but are usually only found in tropical places that are very warm. Candy thought the closest mangrove was miles away in the warmer southern parts of Florida. What was this little shrub doing so far from home? The more that Candy and her colleague Emily looked, the more mangroves they found in places they had not been before.

Candy and Emily wondered why mangroves were starting to pop up in northern Florida. Previous research has shown nitrogen and phosphorus are often the limiting nutrients in saltmarshes. They thought that fertilizers being washed into the ocean have made nitrogen or phosphorus available for mangroves, allowing them to grow in that area for the first time. So, Candy and Emily designed an experiment to figure out which nutrient was limiting for saltmarsh plants. 

mangrove saltmarsh researchers
Candy (right) and Emily (left) measure the height of a black mangrove growing in the saltmarsh.

For their study, Candy and Emily chose to focus on black mangroves and saltwort plants. These two species are often found growing together, and mangroves have to compete with saltwort. Candy and Emily found a saltmarsh near St. Augustine, Florida, in which they could set up an experiment. They set up 12 plots that contained both black mangrove and saltwort. Each plot had one mangrove plant and multiple smaller saltwort plants. That way, when they added nutrients to the plots they could compare the responses of mangroves with the responses of saltwort. 

To each of the 12 plots they applied one of three conditions: control (no extra nutrients), nitrogen added, and phosphorus added. They dug two holes in each plot and added the nutrients using fertilizers, which slowly released into the nearby soil. In the case of control plots, they dug the holes but put the soil back without adding fertilizer.

Candy and Emily repeated this process every winter for four years. At the end of four years, they measured plant height and percent cover for the two species. Percent (%) cover is a way of measuring how densely a plant grows, and is the percentage of a given area that a plant takes up when viewed from above. Candy and Emily measured percent cover in 1×1 meter plots. The cover for each species could vary from 0 to 100%.

Featured scientists: Candy Feller from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and Emily Dangremond from Roosevelt University

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 8.3

11.4.20

Corals in a strange place

Marine Biologist, Karina, snorkeling in the mangroves. Photo by John Finnerty.

The activities are as follows:

When you imagine a coral, you likely picture it living on a coral reef, bathed in sunlight, surrounded by crystal clear waters teeming with colorful fishes. But corals can actually live in a range of habitats, even habitats that are sometimes murky and much darker!

As marine biologists, Karina and John often snorkel around the mangroves in Belize, where they do their research. Mangroves are trees that have roots able to grow in saltwater. By capturing mud and sediment, these underwater roots build habitat for marine life. While Karina and John were documenting the different marine life that can grow on underwater roots, they noticed something shocking. The same corals that live on coral reefs were growing in the mangrove forests too! This surprised Karina and John because coral reefs and mangrove forests are very different habitats. Coral reefs have clear water and bright light, while mangrove forests are darker with murky water that has a lot of nutrients. How can corals live in such different places?

Karina and John started to wonder if the corals that live in the mangroves look different than the corals on the reefs. Sometimes animals can look different based on where they live. These differences may be adaptations that help them live in different environments. Karina and John measured differences between two different coral species that were found in both habitat types. The two species they used are the mounding mustard hill coral and the branching thin finger coral.   

Featured scientists: Karina Scavo Lord and John Finnerty from Boston University

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 8.9

7.24.20

Limit by limit: Nutrients control algal growth in Arctic streams

The Arctic Stream Team. Frances, Breck, Abby, Alex, Jay, and Arial at Toolik Field Station in 2019. 

The activities are as follows:

You rely on the nutrients from the foods you eat to grow and thrive. Other organisms, like microbes, do as well! Aquatic algae, a type of microbe that live in the water, need to take in nutrients from their surroundings for growth. Two important nutrients for algal growth are nitrogen (N) and phosphorous (P).

Sometimes the environment does not have all the nutrients that aquatic algae need to grow. When one nutrient is less available compared to others, algae can become nutrient limited. Research on nutrient limitation started with Justus Liebig, a 19th century scientist who proposed the “law of the minimum.” The law states that the nutrient available in the lowest amount relative to demand will limit overall growth and production. This means that growth is not controlled by all the nutrients, but by the scarcest one (the “limiting factor”). When more than one nutrient limits growth, algae are considered co-limited. This just means that a combination of two nutrients are needed for algae to grow. Knowing what nutrients are limiting growth helps scientists understand how an ecosystem is working.  

From other research we know that many ecosystems, including those in the Alaskan Arctic, are phosphorus-limited. Scientists figured this out because they found if they added phosphorus, then algae growth increased. However, climate change could change this. As the Arctic warms, ecosystems on land might start to release nutrients in higher amounts or new proportions into the water. These extra nutrients will likely cause increases in algae growth in streams and ponds, which in turn could change food webs and nutrient cycling. It is therefore important to understand which nutrients are currently limiting algae growth before climate change changes things even more. This starts with tests to see how Arctic algae grow in response to changes in N, P, and N and P in the water.  

A team of scientists got to work on this question! Arial, Jay, Frances, Alex, Breck, and Abby are all interested in understanding how climate change may alter nutrient limitations in Arctic streams. Each team member has a unique role in the larger research project. For example, undergraduate researcher Abby spent her 2019 summer at Toolik Field Station in Northern Alaska as part of a research opportunity. She explored nutrient limitation in one particular lake, called Lake I8. 

Abby used small cups that placed into the streams that fed into Lake I8. These cups were filled with agar gel, a material used in labs to grow microbes. Each cup contained different nutrient treatments. Abby used four different treatments in her cups: (1) a control (agar only), (2) agar + nitrogen, (3) agar + phosphorus, and (4) agar + nitrogen + phosphorus. On the top of each cup, she placed a glass disk to provide a surface for the algae to grow.

A. Cups before going into the stream. B. Abby putting out her cup treatments into an Arctic stream. C. Cups incubating under water in an Arctic stream. D. Analyzing Chlorophyll a extracted from the cups. 

Abby put 5 replicate cups for each treatment at both the Inlet and Outlet streams on the I8 Lake. She left them underwater for 4 weeks. She brought the cups back to the lab to measure the algae that grew on each glass disk. Abby measured how much algae grew on each disk by measuring the amount of Chlorophyll a, the green pigment that helps plants photosynthesize. The more pigment, the more the algae is growing. Abby compared the data from the control to each of the other treatments. When there is more growth in a treatment compared to the control, that means a particular nutrient was limiting at that location. Abby expected that the streams would be limited by the amount of phosphorus, but not the amount of nitrogen. She predicted algae would grow more when they are given additional phosphorus compared to the control treatment.

Featured scientists: Abigail Rec from Gettysburg College; Frances Iannucci, Alex Medvedeff, and Breck Bowden from University of Vermont; Arial Shogren and Jay Zarnetske from Michigan State University

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 8.6

4.10.20

Working to reduce the plastics problem

stretching the raw, preformed polymers
Nick (right) and one of his students (left) stretching the raw, preformed polymers.

The activities are as follows:

Plastics are materials that can be shaped easily and are used for many functions. This has made them extremely popular across the world. Thousands of products are made using plastic, including parts of cell phones, food wrappers from your lunch, and even the stitches you may need after an injury. In fact, if you look around right now, you can probably spot at least ten items made of plastic!

Once a plastic is made, it tends to stick around. Synthetic plastics, made by humans from petroleum, cannot be broken down by nature’s decomposers – bacteria and fungi. This means they impact the environment for many, many years. Some types can take thousands of years or longer to break down! 

Nick is a chemist concerned with the negative impacts caused by plastics. He knows that in order to reduce the amount of synthetic plastics in the environment, we need an alternative. And, this alternative needs to be just as good as the synthetic plastic it is replacing. Nick and his undergraduate students at Northland College are testing new ways to make plastics that are biodegradable, meaning they can be decomposed naturally and won’t last as long in the environment. His research focuses on stretchy plastics, called elastomers.Elastomers are what make up rubber bands, tires, hoses, non-latex gloves, and many more items we use every day. 

To try to solve the problem of making a biodegradable elastomer that has all the qualities of a synthetic one, Nick and his students got to work. First, they had to consider the chemical structure of plastics. Plastics are made of polymers. “Poly” means “many” and “mer” means “parts”. This means that plastics are made of long chain molecules with many repeating parts. These repeating parts are called monomers. Different monomers can be used to make different types of plastic.

Nick chose to test two biodegradable monomers – diglycerol and meso-erythritol. Diglycerol is cheap and easy to buy. However, it might be too soft when used on its own. Meso-erythritol is more expensive, but more rigid. They wanted to use diglycerol and meso-erythritol because the chemical structures have the potential to create something that is not too rigid and not too flexible.

Nick and his students designed an experiment in which they tested elastomers made from each of the monomers (diglycerol and meso-erythritol) alone, as well as elastomers made using both types of monomers. They made elastomers with the following percentage ratios of diglycerol over meso-erythritol: 100/0, 75/25, 50/50, 25/75, 0/100. The team was hoping to find the “sweet spot” between a product that is too stiff, and one that is not stiff enough to be useful in elastic materials. Once they finished making their elastomers, they prepared the stretch tests. 

To start a stretch test, the team had to stamp out a piece of material from each elastomer, creating samples with the same size, shape, and thickness. They also cut pieces from rubber bands made of synthetic plastics to compare as a control. Next, they tested the elastomers using a machine that measures how much force is applied (stress) as a material is stretched (strain), both important measures of elasticity. The stress, or force per unit of area, is measured in megapascals (MPa) while the strain, or amount of stretch, is measured as a percent of the original length. 

Featured scientist: Nick Robertson from Northland College. Written by: Theresa Paulsen from Ashland High School, Wisconsin

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 9.6

For additional information on the plastic problem, and Nick’s research, check out the following resources:

3.26.20

Where to find the hungry, hungry herbivores

Carina and some pokeweed plants in Tennessee.

The activities are as follows:

Éste Data Nugget también está disponible en Español:

When travelling to warm, tropical places you are exposed to greater risk of diseases like malaria, yellow fever, or dengue fever. The same pattern of risk is true for other species besides humans. For example, scientists have noticed that crops seem to have more problems with pests if they grow at lower latitudes (closer to the equator). Locations that are at lower latitudes have warm climates. We don’t know exactly why there are more pests in warmer places, but it could be because pests have a hard time surviving very cold winters. 

Carina is interested in figuring out more about this pest-y problem. She first got excited about plants in school, when she learned that they use photosynthesis to make their own food out of light, air, and water. She thought it was fascinating that plants have evolved so many different strategies to survive. Even though they don’t have brains, plants do have adaptations that help them compete for light and mate in many different habitats. Carina continues to learn more every day, and especially enjoys researching how plants defend themselves against herbivores, or animals that eat plants. Herbivores pose a challenge because plants can’t run away or hide! 

Carina studies ways wild plants can defend themselves against herbivores. What she learns in wild plants could give us ideas of how to help crops defend against pests too. Scientists aren’t sure why crops have more pest problems in warmer places, but it would help to understand if wild plants also have the same pattern. 

Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) is a common wild plant that grows all over the eastern US. Pokeweed has beautiful pink stems and dark purple berries. In fact, the Declaration of Independence was written with ink made from pokeweed berry juice!

So Carina decided to travel all across the eastern United States to measure herbivory on pokeweed, a common wild plant there. Carina drove a lot for this project! In one summer, she visited ten patches of pokeweed spread out between Michigan and Florida. Carina thought that the pokeweed found at lower latitudes (Florida, 27° N) would have higher herbivory than pokeweed at northern latitudes (Michigan, 42° N) because pests may not be able to survive as well in places with harsh winters. 

At each of the ten sites, she marked five very young leaves on 30 to 40 plants. That equals over 1,500 leaves! She then came back six weeks later to measure how much the leaves were eaten as they grew into large, mature leaves. When leaves are young, they are more tender and can be more easily eaten by herbivores (that’s why we eat “baby spinach” salad). To measure herbivory she compared the area that was eaten to the total area of the leaf, and calculated the percent of the leaf area eaten by caterpillars, the main herbivores on pokeweed. She then averaged the percent eaten on leaves for each plant. Some plants died in those 6 weeks, so the sample size at the end of the study ranged from 4 to 37 depending on the site.

Featured scientist: Carina Baskett from Michigan State University

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 9.4

There is one scientific paper associated with the research in this Data Nugget. The citation and link to the paper is below.

Baskett, C.A. and D.W. Schemske (2018) Latitudinal patterns of herbivore pressure in a temperate herb support the biotic interactions hypothesis. Ecology Letters 21(4):578-587.

1.15.20

The end of winter as we’ve known it?

Forrest standing in front of the ice road that forms between Bayfield and LaPointe each winter, preventing ferry traffic but allowing cars to travel between the mainland and island.

The activities are as follows:

As a boy growing up in Bayfield, Wisconsin, Forrest was familiar with the seasonal rhythms of Lake Superior and the nearby Apostle Islands. Forrest watched each year as ice formed in the Bayfield Harbor, stopping the boat traffic each winter. Eventually, as the ice thickened even more, an ice road would open between Bayfield and LaPointe. The small town of LaPointe is located on Madeline Island just over two miles from the shore of Bayfield. When the ice road opens, it frees the island residents from working around the ferry schedule and they can drive on the ice to get to the mainland.

As a senior at Bayfield High School, Forrest became interested in conducting a scientific study related to the ice season on Lake Superior. He knew that Lake Superior plays a vital role in the lives of people who live and work on its shores and therefore all sorts of data are recorded to help understand and take care of it. Based on his own observations and comments of other area residents, Forrest thought that winters were getting shorter. He wanted to know whether the length of the ice season was changing over time. Forrest turned to historical data to answer his question. 

Forrest’s first stop on his quest to find data was the Madeline Island Ferry Line, a company that operates the ferries between Bayfield and LaPointe. Since 1970, the ferry line has kept yearly records of the date on which the last ferry traveled between Bayfield and LaPointe before the water was too frozen for travel. They also recorded the date on which the first ferry traveled the channel when ice melted in the spring. That gave Forrest a start, but he wanted data that would date farther back than 1970. 

Luckily, Forrest’s father, Neil, was an interpretive ranger for the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. Neil showed Forrest local newspaper archives that were stored in the basement of their headquarters building. News about shipping and fishing have been important to the people in the community throughout history, so it was common to find articles referencing the first and last boat of each year. Looking back through newspaper records, Forrest and Neil were able to collect data for almost every year dating back to 1857!

Armed with these data, Forrest began his analyses. He chose to define the length of the ice season as the time between the last boat each winter and the first boat each spring. This also represents the time during which there was no boat navigation due to ice cover. Forrest’s next step was to choose how to quantify the dates. He decided to use Julian dates, which start with January 1 as Day 1 and continue to count up by 1 for each day. This means that January 31 would be Day 31, February 1 would be Day 32, and March 1 would be Day 61. After assigning Julian dates to each historical data point, Forrest subtracted the day of the last boat from the day of the first boat to find the number of days without boat traffic each year. This number serves as a consistent way to estimate the length of the ice season each year. Winter begins in one calendar year but ends in the next, so Forrest identified the year based on the calendar year that the winter began.

Featured scientist: Forrest Howk, Bayfield High School. Written by: Richard Erickson, Bayfield High School and Hannah Erickson, Boston Public Schools

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 10.1

Additional teacher resources related to this Data Nugget include:

  • If you would like your students to interact with the raw data, we have attached the original data here.
  • Forrest’s study was published in the Journal of Great Lakes Research.
  • Scientists at the Large Lakes Observatory in Duluth, MN have conducted studies related to Lake Superior’s water temperatures. This website includes real-time data collection from buoys in Lake Superior that would likely yield usable data for student investigations.
  • Dr. John Magnuson of the University of Wisconsin has conducted studies of ice cover for lakes at latitudes across the globe. He wrote an article about projected changes in ice cover due to climate change at various latitudes around the world. In addition, his website has links to publications and further information.


12.20.19

Fishy origins

Fred Bogue holding a striped bass.

The activities are as follows:

Striped bass, or stripers, make up one of the most important fisheries for seafood and sport fishing on the East Coast of the United States. Carleigh and Chelsea, biology teachers in New Jersey, were at the beach one day when they saw a couple of stripers in the Barnegat Bay Inlet. Both teachers have always been interested in research and even met while participating in a summer research program as undergraduate students. Since then, both have gone on to complete more research projects in biology and education. Their curiosity about striper populations led them to work together yet again! 

They headed to Monmouth University in New Jersey, where they began working with two scientists, Megan and John. They learned that locations where fish reproduce are called spawning grounds. Young stripers spend 2-3 years developing in the spawning ground before moving downstream. When stripers become adults, they return to the same location to breed. 

There are four main spawning grounds for stripers on the East coast: the Hudson River, the Chesapeake Bay, Delaware River, and the Albermarle Sound. Stripers from these areas are considered to be different stocks. Stripers are migratory fish, and generally move north in the spring and south in the fall. Because they all migrate to New Jersey, fish from different stocks combine, which results in a mixed stock. When there is a population that has a mixed stock, we don’t know which spawning ground the fish originally came from. Conservation and management of New Jersey’s striper fishery requires knowing where the fish come from. Understanding which spawning grounds stripers are using helps managers make sure we are not overfishing or damaging these important environments. So, Carleigh and Chelsea joined a project that is working to find out how we can identify where mixed stock stripers come from. 

For their study, the scientists caught stripers in three different locations off the New Jersey coast in 2017. The fish were sampled by clipping off a small portion of the right pelvic fin. The scientists then extracted the DNA from each sample in the lab. They used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to then copy regions of the DNA, called microsatellites. Microsatellites are small, repeating sections of DNA that can be variable enough to distinguish even close relatives. These data were then used to compare DNA samples from the unknown mixed stocks to the known spawning ground stocks. The scientists also recorded whether each fish was young or mature. The scientists then used the age data to tell whether the spawning grounds might be changing over time. 

Featured scientists: Carleigh Engstrom, Chelsea Barreto, Megan Phifer-Rixey, and John Tiedemann from Monmouth University 

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 9.2

12.11.19

A window into a tree’s world

Neil taking a tree core from a pine tree.

The activities are as follows:

According to National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the years 2015-2018 were the warmest recorded on Earth in modern times! And it is only expected to get warmer. Temperatures in the Northeastern U.S. are projected to increase 3.6°F by 2035. Every year the weather is a bit different, and some years there are more extremes with very hot or cold temperatures. Climate gives us a long-term perspective and is the average weather, including temperature and precipitation, over at least 30 years. 

Over thousands of years, tree species living in each part of the world have adapted to their local climate. Trees play an important role in climate change by helping cool the planet – through photosynthesis, they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and evaporate water into the air. 

Scientists are very interested in learning how trees respond to rapidly warming temperatures. Luckily, trees offer us a window into their lives through their growth rings. Growth rings are found within the trunk, beneath the bark. Each year of growth has two parts that can be seen: a light ring of large cells with thin walls, which grows in the spring; and a dark layer of smaller cells with thick walls that forms later in the summer and fall. Ring thickness is used to study how much the tree has grown over the years. Dendrochronology is the use of these rings to study trees and their environments.

Different tree species have different ranges of temperatures and rainfall in which they grow best. When there are big changes in the environment, tree growth slows down or speeds up in response. Scientists can use these clues in tree’s rings to decipher what climate was like in the past. There is slight variation in how each individual tree responds to temperature and rainfall. Because of this, scientists need to measure growth rings of multiple individuals to observe year-to-year changes in past climate.

Jessie taking a tree core in the winter.

Jessie and Neil are two scientists who use tree rings for climate research. Jessie entered the field of science because she was passionate about climate change. As a research assistant, Neil saw that warming temperatures in Mongolia accelerated growth in very old Siberian pine trees. When he later studied to become a scientist, he wanted to know if trees in the eastern U.S. responded to changes in climate in the same way as the old pine trees in Mongolia. As a result, there were two purposes for Jessie’s and Neil’s work. They wanted to determine if there was a species that could be used to figure out what the climate looked like in the past, and understand how it has changed over time.

Jessie and Neil decided to focus on one particular species of tree – the Atlantic white cedar. Atlantic white cedar grow in swamps and wetlands along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts from southern Maine to northern Florida. Atlantic white cedar trees are useful in dendrochronology studies because they can live for up to 500 years and are naturally resistant to decay, so their well-preserved rings provide a long historical record. Past studies of this species led them to predict that in years when the temperature is warmer, Atlantic white cedar rings will be wider. If this pattern holds, the thickness of Atlantic white cedar rings can be used to look backwards into the past climate of the area. 

To test this prediction, Jessie and Neil needed to look at tree rings from many Atlantic white cedar trees. Jessie used an increment borer, a specialized tool that drills into the center of the tree. This drill removes a wood core with a diameter about equal to that of a straw. She sampled 112 different trees from 8 sites, and counted the rings to find the age of each tree. She then crossdated the wood core samples. Crossdating is the process of comparing the ring patterns from many trees in the same area to see if they tell the same story. Jessie used a microscope linked to a computer to measure the thickness of both the early and late growth to the nearest micrometer (1 micrometer = 0.001 millimeter) for all rings in all 112 trees. From those data she then calculated the average growth of Atlantic white cedar for each year to create an Atlantic white cedargrowth index for the Northeastern U.S. She combined her tree ring data with temperature data from the past 100 years.

Featured scientists: Jessie K Pearl, University of Arizona and Neil Pederson, Harvard University. Written by Elicia Andrews.

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 9.9

Suggestions for inquiry surrounding this Data Nugget:

These videos, demonstrating the science of dendrochronology, could be a great way to spark class discussions:

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