Tracing silicon to learn about diatoms

I first heard about the CUSCO project when Dr. Mar Fernández-Méndez approached my advisor, Dr. Jeffrey Krause, about sending a member of his lab to participate. The project itself is investigating how changes in a certain physical process, upwelling, will affect the world’s most productive marine fishery off the coast of Peru. Upwelling, for those […]

The deep water hunt

32 µmol nitrate per liter – fantastic!! Better than I dared to dream. But let’s start from the beginning. The main objective of our study is to unravel how changes in upwelling intensity affect the food web and elemental cycling in the Peruvian upwelling system. Simply speaking, should upwelling intensity decline let’s say by 50% […]

It’s go time baby!

Water perspective by Sebastian Cantarero: After weeks of preparing, scheming, and building of suspense the day finally arrived! A group of highly trained secret agent scientists waited in the wee hours of the morning for word that Captain Jana and the sediment trap team was returning to dock, giving us the go ahead to start […]

The mesocosms touch water

The day started really early. At 5am we all met at the dive locker and brought everything we needed to the boats. Ropes, life vests, helmets, food, cable ties, lashing straps, lamps, fuel …. are we forgetting anything? We were all tired but at the same time excited. After 15 days in La Punta waiting […]

Be flexible

The KOSMOS-CUSCO project focuses on the links between upwelling intensity, primary productivity, export and trophic transfer efficiency in a changing climate. They seek to understand the reasons for the out of phase seasonal cycle between nutrient supply and phytoplankton productivity, an unexplained phenomenon unique to the Humboldt upwelling system. In a complementary way, Humboldt Tipping […]

How to study the future of the “most heavily exploited fish in world history”

First of all, you need to know which one that is: it’s the Peruvian Anchovy and it´s caught in such enormous quantities that it´s the biggest single-species fishery in the world. But it’s not used by humans directly, the hand-long fishes are ground to fishmeal and fish oil and are then shipped all over the world […]