Spent Saturday making sediment cores and solving mysteries of the seafloor with Ashley, Lisa, and Darci

Saturday September 21 2019, David Black from SBU taught visitors to the LIA about sediment cores and tiny fossils that can be used to figure out about past climates.

This Saturday we learned about different infections shellfish can have on Long Island and about the diagnostic services shellfish hatcheries use to make sure they have healthy animals. We dissected oysters and mussels and looked at slides of parasites!

Alyson Lowell demonstrated how pH in seawater changes when you add CO2 and how to measure salinity in different types of water!

April 20, 2019 – Ocean Acidification: Seagrasses; A Last Hope
Alysson Lowell, Stony Brook University. Ocean acidification is further exacerbated by coastal influences like nutrient loading and runoff. The result is an environment more vulnerable and more intense for coastal marine organisms. Both low oxygen and high acidity combine to generate organisms more physiologically stressed than their open ocean counterparts. Seagrasses may provide a refuge for marine organisms in this highly dynamic and changing world. Highly productive producing oxygen rich and comparatively more basic environments, seagrasses are more attuned to the changing oceans than many of their macrophytic counterparts.

Eelgrass (Zostera marina) in Great South Bay. Photo from https://www.dec.ny.gov/lands/110813.html.

November 10, 2018

Oliver Shipley, Stony Brook University. In the media, sharks have long been painted as terrifying, blood-thirsty killers, but they are definitively more than that. Meet with a local shark scientist and learn about the role of sharks in governing healthy marine ecosystems, and why we should care about conserving their populations.

Photo Credit: https://www.newsday.com/long-island/sharks-long-island-1.19933809

September 22, 2018 –WANTED! Oxygen

Luis Medina, Stony Brook University. You may have heard of “dead zones” in the ocean, but what does this mean? Meet with local scientist and find out why the ocean is running out of oxygen, what areas this is happening to and the potential impacts on your favorite marine organisms!

Photo credit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology)

Had a great time learning about skates, sharks, and the cool “mermaid purses” we all see at the beach with Lisa Crawford, Irvin Huang, Michael Clerkin.