Revealing the biology of marine snowflakes using underwater imaging

Marine snow particles sink from the surface ocean and feed deep sea animals while transporting carbon away from the atmosphere. This "biological pump" of life's detritus to the deep ocean is one way that the ocean regulates our climate. To make more realistic models of the ocean's carbon cycle and predict how food supply to deep sea ecosystems are changing, we must have a quantitative understanding of the mechanisms controlling carbon export. Achieving this goal is especially challenge because the formation, transport, and degradation of sinking marine snow particles is largely controlled by stochastic and unconstrained ecological interactions. In this talk I will explain how characterizing the biological source of sinking particles reveals mechanisms of the biological carbon pump. Our team develops various underwater imaging systems to collect these detailed biological observations at large time and space scales. We think that imaging tools applied at scale will help improve our framework of the ocean carbon cycle by providing realistic biological observations.

Speaker: Colleen Durkin, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute