Scientific news

Researchers from the Institute of Marine Sciences of Barcelona (ICM-CSIC) have completed the project "Conservation and Recovery of Depth Gorgonians Populations through Ecological Restoration and Fisheries Impact Mitigation" (ResCap 2018). The project has recovered 450 gorgonians in the same areas where they were catched in fishing nets, to restore the seabed. The conditions for maximizing the growth in aquarium of gorgonian fragments have also been determined, in order to generate new individuals for the restoration of impacted populations.

The Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC) participates as a sponsor entity in The Things Network (TTN) and installs a free and public use antenna to transmit data between devices.

The Raymond L. Lindeman Award honors a young scientist for an outstanding peer-reviewed, English-language paper in the aquatic sciences. The Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) has awarded Andrea G. Bravo, currently with a “Marie Sklodowska-Curie” post-doc position at the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC), the 2019 Lindeman Award for her paper, “Molecular composition of organic matter controls methylmercury formation in boreal lakes”.

Epigenetics, the study of heritable changes in gene expression that don’t involve changes in the DNA sequence, is an extraordinarily active research field in biology nowadays. Epigenetic modifications integrate environmental and genetic information to give a certain phenotype (the set of characteristics showed by an individual) and can be transmitted from generation to generation, making it possible for characters acquired by environmental influence to be inherited and passed on to the descendants.

From 8th to 13th of July takes place the sixth edition of the "Ramon Margalef Summer Colloquia", organized by the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC) and the Catalan Association of Oceanographers and Oceanographers (ACOIO). Since its first edition in 2013, it gathers each summer young researchers and experts to exchange ideas on the advances in ecological research.

Tropical oceans teem with the dazzle and flash of colorful reef fishes and contain far more species than the cold ocean waters found at high latitudes. This well-known “latitudinal diversity gradient” is one of the most famous patterns in biology, and scientists have puzzled over its causes for more than 200 years.