Blog

Happy new year to all! Gingerbread village.

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. Microscopy of samples from the Bedford Basin.

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 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. ...

We’ve been in our new lab for two years