Scientific news

The Marine Science Institute (ICM-CSIC) opens its laboratories to Catalan students to build an oceanographic buoy. The activity is part of the project "MARduino: my buoy, our data and the sea", co-financed by the FECYT (Fundación Española para la Ciencia Y la Tecnología) and led by Carine Simon from the Biooptic group of the Marine Science Institute.

Microbes are the most important form of life in the oceans, playing key roles in ecosystem functioning at local and global scales. Yet, our knowledge on their diversity patterns and the structure of their communities is very limited, specially among marine protists (microbial eukaryotes).

The Symposium, that takes place at the Institute of Marine Sciences from 26 to 30 of May, is the 6th of a series that started in 1995 in Mobile, Alabama, and resumed with meetings in Groningen, Rimouski, Norwich and Goa. It is meant to provide an open and collaborative atmosphere across the interdisciplinary community that investigates the processes underlying the production and cycling of dimethylsulfide (DMS), dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP) and related compounds, and their relevance in physiology, ecology, global biogeochemistry and climate.

A study led by scientists from the Polytechnic University of Marche (Ancona, Italy) involving researchers from the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM, CSIC) and the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), has determined that fishing trawling causes intensive, long-term biological desertification of the sedimentary seabed ecosystems, diminishing their content in organic carbon and threatening their biodiversity.

A major new survey of the seafloor has found that even in the deepest ocean depths you can find bottles, plastic bags, fishing nets and other types of human litter. The litter was found throughout the Mediterranean, and all the way from the continental shelf of Europe to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge 2,000 kilometres from land. Litter is a problem in the marine environment as it can be mistaken for food and eaten by some animals or can entangle coral and fish – a process known as "ghost fishing".

In an opinion article published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution by researchers of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (UPF and CSIC) and the Institute of Marine Sciences (CSIC), with the participation of US and Canadian researchers, the authors show that despite the large efforts to sequence the genomes of as many organisms as possible, the knowledge of the large diversity within eukaryotes (higher organisms) is still extremely poor.