Saving Seafood

Marine ‘superfertilizer’ is crucial for life in the ocean and on land, including humans

October 1, 2025 — Half the oxygen in your next breath did not come from trees on land. Scientists estimate that phytoplankton in the ocean make about half of the oxygen in the air in Earth’s atmosphere.

These microscopic drifters depend on nutrients that large whales move to the sunlit surface when they release nutrient rich waste.

Field research shows that marine mammals enhance primary productivity by concentrating nitrogen near the surface through flocculent fecal plumes.

Phytoplankton and oxygen

After decades of field work, Robert Kenney, an emeritus marine research scientist at the University of Rhode Island (URI), has traced how whales, prey, and currents shape each season. His perspective helps connect nutrients, food webs, and survival across years.

Phytoplankton are tiny photosynthetic organisms that turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into sugar and oxygen. Zooplankton are small animals that graze on them and feed fish, seabirds, and whales.

When nutrients are scarce near the surface, phytoplankton growth slows and the whole food web tightens. When nutrients pulse upward, growth accelerates and energy ripples through the system.

Whales often feed at depth and then return to the surface to rest, breathe, and digest. When they defecate near the surface, their waste carries nitrogen and iron that phytoplankton can use right away.

That burst of nutrients supports fast growth, which boosts food for krill and fish in the upper ocean. Many large whales filter this prey using baleen, flexible plates in their mouths that act like a sieve.

The loop continues when predators eat that prey and release nutrients again in shallow water. Over time, this recycling keeps productivity higher than it would be without whales.

Read the full article at Earth.com

The ocean is changing colors, researchers say. Here’s what it means.

June 20, 2025 — Warming waters are causing the colors of the ocean to change — a trend that could impact humans if it were to continue, according to new research.

Satellite data shows that ocean waters are getting greener at the poles and bluer toward the equator, according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Science.

The change in hue is being caused by shifting concentrations of a green pigment called chlorophyll, which is produced by phytoplankton, Haipeng Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the paper, told ABC News.

Phytoplankton are photosynthetic marine organisms. As algae, phytoplankton has photosynthetic pigments, which reflect green light and cause the waters around it to appear primarily green, Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-author of the paper, told ABC News. Where phytoplankton are absent, the water appears blue.

Read the full article at ABC News

Rising Temperatures Are Scrambling the Base of the Ocean Food Web

March 3, 2025 — Humans are living in a plankton world. These minuscule organisms are spread across the oceans, covering nearly three-quarters of the planet, and are among the most abundant forms of life on Earth.

But a warming world is throwing plankton into disarray and threatening the entire marine food chain that is built on them.

A year ago, NASA launched a satellite that provided the most detailed view yet of the diversity and distribution of phytoplankton. Its insights should help scientists understand the changing dynamics of life in the ocean.

“Do you like breathing? Do you like eating? If your answer is yes for either of them, then you care about phytoplankton,” said Jeremy Werdell, the lead scientist for the satellite program, called PACE, which stands for “Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem.”

Historically, research from ships has captured limited snapshots in time, offering only glimpses of the ever-changing oceans. The advent of satellites gave a fuller picture, but one still limited, like looking through glasses with a green filter.

“You know it’s a garden, you know it’s pretty, you know it’s plants, but you don’t know which plants,” explained Ivona Cetinic, a NASA oceanographer. The PACE satellite effectively removes the filter and finally reveals all the colors of the garden, she said. “It’s like seeing all the flowers of the ocean.”

These flowers are phytoplankton, tiny aquatic algae and bacteria that photosynthesize to live directly off energy from the sun. They are eaten by zooplankton, the smallest animals of the ocean, which, in turn, feed fish and larger creatures.

It may seem implausible that a satellite orbiting high above the planet’s surface could make out microscopic organisms. But different phytoplankton have unique ways of scattering and absorbing light. PACE measures the whole spectrum of visible color and slightly beyond, from ultraviolet to near infrared, allowing scientists to identify different kinds of phytoplankton. Older satellites measured limited colors and could only reveal how much phytoplankton was underneath them, not what kind.

Phytoplankton form the foundation of the marine food chain, and climate change is shaking that foundation.

Read the full article at the Pulitzer Center

Scientists make stunning breakthrough that could solve major problem plaguing our oceans — and the solution lies in whale feces

December 6, 2024 — A small team of environmental and ocean scientists in Australia, known as Whale X, may have discovered a way to remove carbon from the atmosphere efficiently, Hakai Magazine reported. The key to their solution is replicating whale poo.

Whale feces are high in essential nutrients that support the growth of phytoplanktons — a microscopic marine algae that feeds the rest of the ocean food chain.

Phytoplanktons also efficiently capture carbon dioxide, as land plants do, clearing the atmosphere of planet-warming gases. Per Hakai, phytoplanktons absorb “roughly 22 megatonnes (22,000,000 tons) of carbon dioxide (CO2) each year — the amount emitted by about 4.8 million vehicles.”

To put this all into perspective, the most efficient carbon-absorbing tree species — the oak tree — captures only 12 tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to the United States National Marine Fisheries Service.

Read the full story at The Cool Down

Long-term ocean sampling in Narragansett Bay reveals plummeting plankton levels: impact uncertain for local food web

May 16, 2024 — URI researchers estimate that in Narragansett Bay, the level of tiny plantlike creatures called phytoplankton has dropped by half in the last half century, based on new analysis of a long-term time series study of the bay.

That’s what a new paper published by the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography (GSO) reports — news, recently uncovered, that is both surprising and concerning.

Analyzing the full time series of the bay, the research team found that phytoplankton biomass in Narragansett Bay declined by a stunning 49% from 1968 to 2019. The intensity of the winter-spring bloom, which starts the annual cycle of productivity in the Bay, decreased over time and is also occurring earlier each year.

URI’s new study in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) shares information from one of the longest plankton time series in the world. The subject of study is not only a destination for generations of Rhode Islanders and tourists but a fruitful site of research for oceanographers at URI’s Narragansett Bay Campus.

“A lot of people live, work and play on the shores of Narragansett Bay,” Oceanography Professor Tatiana Rynearson says, providing key goods and services for the nearly 2 million people who inhabit its watershed. Even in the dense Northeast, Narragansett Bay stands out as a well-used body of water. The bay sits between regions of cold winters and warm summers, Arctic waters to the north and warm waters to the south, existing at a bit of a scientific sweet spot that offers researchers a dynamic environment to study.

Read the full article at the The University of Rhode Island

Autonomous Vehicles Powered by Ocean Waves Support NOAA Fisheries Research

December 4, 2023 — Scientists from NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center are using autonomous surface vehicles called Wave Gliders to study ocean health in Hawaiʻi. Wave Gliders are circumnavigating each of the Hawaiian Islands. They’re collecting data on ocean conditions that will be used to help estimate the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems and fisheries across the state.

“We are primarily interested in measuring chlorophyll, which provides a good estimate of phytoplankton biomass in the ocean,” said Dr. Jamison Gove, an oceanographer with the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center and co-lead scientist on the project. “Phytoplankton are the basis for productive and healthy ecosystems, so knowing where and how much phytoplankton there are in the ocean aids in understanding the entire marine food-web,” added Dr. Gove.

The Building Blocks of Ocean Ecosystems

Phytoplankton are microscopic plants that live near the ocean surface. They are similar to land-based plants: They contain chlorophyll and require sunlight to live and grow. Phytoplankton are the base of the food chain. Their biomass—the total amount of them in a given region of the ocean—dictates fisheries yields and ecosystem productivity across the world.

Read the full story at NOAA Fisheries

Phytoplankton blooms offer insight into impacts of climate change

March 23, 2023 — The first study into the biological response of the upper ocean in the wake of South Pacific cyclones could help predict the impact of warming ocean temperatures, New Zealand researchers believe.

Dr. Pete Russell, of the University of Otago’s Department of Marine Science, and Dr. Christopher Horvat, of the University of Auckland’s Department of Physics, have published a study on the oceanic biological effect of Cyclone Oma which passed near Vanuatu in 2019.

“While Oma was a relatively benign , it produced a massive phytoplankton  in its wake—the single most abnormal event in the history of South Pacific chlorophyll measurements,” Dr. Russell says.

“Such an extreme event can produce a large amount of biomass in a part of the  that is typically a biological desert. We don’t yet know about the fate of this biomass, but one possibility is that it could end up on the bottom of the ocean, sequestering carbon.”

Read the full article at phys.org

Loss of tiny organisms hurts ocean, fishing, scientists say

January 23, 2023 — The warming of the waters off the East Coast has come at an invisible, but very steep cost — the loss of microscopic organisms that make up the base of the ocean’s food chain.

The growing warmth and saltiness of the Gulf of Maine off New England is causing a dramatic decrease in the production of phytoplankton, according to Maine-based scientists who recently reported results of a yearslong, NASA-funded study. Phytoplankton, sometimes described as an “invisible forest,” are tiny plant-like organisms that serve as food for marine life.

The scientists found that phytoplankton are about 65% less productive in the Gulf of Maine, part of the Atlantic Ocean bounded by New England and Canada, than they were two decades ago. The Gulf of Maine has emerged as one of the fastest warming sections of the world’s oceans.

Potential loss of phytoplankton has emerged as a serious concern in recent years in other places, such as the Bering Sea off Alaska. The loss of the tiny organisms has the ability to disrupt valuable fishing industries for species such as lobsters and scallops, and it could further jeopardize imperiled animals such as North Atlantic right whales and Atlantic puffins, scientists said.

Read the full article at The Associated Press

NASA-funded Study: Gulf of Maine’s Phytoplankton Productivity Down 65%

June 8, 2022 — The Gulf of Maine is growing increasingly warm and salty, due to ocean currents pushing warm water into the gulf from the Northwest Atlantic, according to a new NASA-funded study. These temperature and salinity changes have led to a substantial decrease in the productivity of phytoplankton that serve as the basis of the marine food web. Specifically, phytoplankton are about 65% less productive in the Gulf of Maine than they were two decades ago, scientists at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay, Maine, report in new results published today.

The Gulf of Maine helps fuel New England’s marine ecosystems and economy. Like plants on land, phytoplankton absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use photosynthesis to grow, and then become a food source for other organisms. Disruptions to their productivity can lead to adverse effects on the region’s fisheries and the communities that depend on them.

“Phytoplankton are at the base of the marine food web on which all of life in the ocean depends, so it’s incredibly [significant] that its productivity has decreased,” says William Balch, the Bigelow Laboratory scientist who led the study. “A drop [of] 65% will undoubtedly have an effect on the carbon flowing through the marine food web, through phytoplankton-eating zooplankton and up to fish and apex predators.”

Read the full story from NASA

Robotic Floats Provide New Look at Ocean Health and Global Carbon Cycle

August 18, 2021 — Microscopic marine life plays a fundamental role in the health of the ocean and, ultimately, the planet. Just like plants on land, tiny phytoplankton use photosynthesis to consume carbon dioxide and convert it into organic matter and oxygen. This biological transformation is known as marine primary productivity.

In a new study in Nature Geoscience this week, MBARI Senior Scientist Ken Johnson and former MBARI postdoctoral fellow Mariana Bif demonstrated how a fleet of robotic floats could revolutionize our understanding of primary productivity in the ocean on a global scale.

Data collected by these floats will allow scientists to more accurately estimate how carbon flows from the atmosphere to the ocean and shed new light on the global carbon cycle. Changes in phytoplankton productivity can have profound consequences, like affecting the ocean’s ability to store carbon and altering ocean food webs. In the face of a changing climate, understanding the ocean’s role in taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it for long periods of time is imperative.

“Based on imperfect computer models, we’ve predicted primary production by marine phytoplankton will decrease in a warmer ocean, but we didn’t have a way to make global-scale measurements to verify models. Now we do,” said MBARI Senior Scientist Ken Johnson.

By converting carbon dioxide into organic matter, phytoplankton not only support oceanic food webs, they are the first step in the ocean’s biological carbon pump.

Phytoplankton consume carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use it to build their bodies. Marine organisms eat those phytoplankton, die, and then sink to the deep seafloor. This organic carbon is gradually respired by bacteria into carbon dioxide. Since a lot of this happens at great depths, carbon is kept away from the atmosphere for long periods of time. This process sequesters carbon in deep-sea water masses and sediments and is a crucial component in modeling Earth’s climate now and in the future.

Read the full story at Eco Magazine