It’s been a very busy start to 2021… notwithstanding a global pandemic, an administrative pivot, and the star of teaching, the team’s also been busy since the publication of our work on sea star wasting disease and the boundary layer oxygen diffusion limitation hypothesis. For the last few weeks, news media outlets from AAAS/Sciencemag through… Read More So how do boundary layer processes scale to the geographic extent of SSWD in 2013-2014? And other future ideas.

I’m excited to announce that the lab has been awarded funding from NSF to study the interaction between oceanographic conditions, sea cucumbers, and a newly-discovered group of enveloped single-stranded RNA viruses (the aquatic invertebrate-only Flaviviruses or aiFVs). We know very little about the ecology of this group of viruses, which are distant relatives of important… Read More New Project – Aquatic Flaviviruses and Sea Cucumbers!

After many years of concerted investigation, the team and some colleagues now have multiple, convergent lines of evidence to suggest that sea star wasting disease is a sequela of organic matter remineralization (and subsequent hypoxic conditions) in the boundary layer overlying respiratory surfaces. We see this reflected in microbiome trends during wasting (copiotrophs –> anaerobes).… Read More New Preprint on Sea Star Wasting – It’s all about the Boundary Layer

Gideon Mordecai (UBC) and I have recently published a mini-review on marine coronaviruses in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology. While not much is known about the true diversity of coronaviruses in marine ecosystems (because they are hugely under-sampled), we can learn about how they may behave in marine habitats through other enveloped, ssRNA viruses.

Originally posted on Microbial Ecology of Sea Star Wasting Disease:
Summer’s wound up for another year, which means the end of a field season. Sea star wasting is, however, only just ramping up. We’ve sadly learned of wasting in several constantly monitored populations of sea stars which had shown a strong recovery since the 2013-2014…

After a highly successful and productive sabbatical in New Zealand (stay tuned for interesting results), we’re back in action investigating sea star wasting in North America. Reports from collaborators and citizen scientists from the west coast indicate that wasting continues at a low(ish) level in sea star populations this boreal spring at some sites, and… Read More New Experiments in Santa Cruz