Award: OCE-1555375

This project provided fundamentally new insights into areas of the ocean that naturally lack oxygen.  My work showed how microscopic organisms survive and can thrive despite being essentially suffocated by low oxygen levels.  One of our main contributions was to show that particular groups of bacteria that convert one form of the element nitrogen to another (nitrite-oxidizing bacteria), are actually quite content with life under low oxygen.  In fact, our work showed that they play a key role in creating such conditions and are, in essence, microscopic engineers of the ocean.  This was a central goal of our research, and we used a wide range of scientific techniques to demonstrate the importance of these underappreciated organisms.  Our work also revealed that these and other organisms are found together, and active together, in specific combinations, or biological ‘networks,’ that closely follow and respond to changing environmental conditions.  I wrote a scientific commentary that highlighted the many complex connections that exist among microorganisms in these important regions of the ocean. 

A major, unexpected, but ultimately important contribution of the project came from encountering a Category 4 hurricane during our second research expedition.  We were able to turn lemons to lemonade by adding an additional sampling location directly in the hurricane’s wake, allowing us to collect unique samples and data that are unmatched anywhere in the ocean.  Storms like these mix the ocean like a blender and are known to fuel bursts of biological activity that are visible from space.  However, directly sampling these wakes is obviously extremely rare.  As a result, we made several fundamentally new discoveries, including showing that low oxygen conditions shift dramatically upwards, that the location we sampled is actually a hurricane hotspot in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and that several of the bacteria identified and examined in our earlier work also ‘bloom’ in the wake of the hurricane.  

This successful and impactful research was conducted by several graduate students and even included several undergraduate students, who received the unique experience of going to sea for several weeks.  On the second expedition, they were joined by a local high school teacher and community college instructor.  Other undergraduates learned about this research, and ocean science much more broadly, through the development of a new undergraduate course.  Online educational content generated during the project is also freely available to all, while research results have been shared with a mix of audiences—including international seminars, public events, conferences, and local libraries, organizations, and elementary schools. 

Last Modified: 07/29/2025
Modified by: John M Beman