News on Marine Microbial Macroecology Lab

Happy New Year

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Happy new year to all!

Gingerbread village.

Bedford Basin Spring Bloom Study begins

Mon, 01 May 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Nuwanthi Samarasinghe and Niall McGinty with help of much of the rest of the lab have started sampling the spring bloom plankton in the Bedford Basin.

Take a look at some of the plankton community contributing to this year’s bloom (images taken by Laura Bretherton and Ruby Hu).

Microscopy of samples from the Bedford Basin.

Gradients 5 cruise in the tropical Pacific

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Laura Bretherton, Niall McGinty, and Kevan Merrow participated in the Simons Foundation-funded Gradients 5 cruise as part of the SCOPE research program.

During 28 days at sea, Laura, Niall and Kevan collected dozens of samples of phytoplankton and zooplankton communities for analysis back in the lab. When all the processing is done, we will have much better knowledge of elemental (C, N, P) and macromolecular content and ratios for these communties across a gradient that spans the oligotrophic gyre to the equatorial upwelling.

Nuwanthi Samarasinghe a 3 minute thesis finalist at Dalhousie

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Nuwanthi Samarasinghe recently participated in the 3MT (three-minute thesis) event at Dalhousie. Graduate students distilled the background, goals, and findings of their research into a three minute presentation with one slide targetted at a general audience. Students first competed in heats and Nuwanthi was one of eleven students selected for the final competition held this week at Dalhousie.

Congratulations to Nuwanthi for her presentation titled: “Do Small Diatoms Matter in the Ocean?” Nuwanthi showed the audience how the smallest diatoms really are important contributors to the marine phytoplankton communities and biogeochemical cycles.

Moving into the new lab

Sun, 02 Dec 2018 09:00:00 +0000

We moved into our new lab this week!

Photo of the new lab shortly after starting to move in.

Visitors from TAMUG

Tue, 01 Aug 2017 12:00:00 +0000

Sam Setta and Laura Bretherton visited our lab for a week to work on bioinformatic analysis of some GOMRI experiments.

We always try to be good hosts for our visitors – this time in addition to lots of hard work this incldued a trip to Hopewell Rocks and Cora’s, a favourite local breakfast place.

Work by Michaël Bradet-Legris featured by Mount Allison

Sat, 15 Jul 2017 12:00:00 +0000

The computing and bioinformatic work being done by summer research student Michaël Bradet-Legris was featured in a Mount Allison story this week.

Click here for the full article.

Archive version.

Dr Ina Benner's research featured in student newspaper (The Argosy)

Thu, 12 Mar 2015 12:00:00 +0000

Dr Benner’s work on phytoplankton evolution was featured in The Argosy this week.

Click here for the full article.