Simons ECIMMEE award

The Simons Foundation Early Career Investigator in Marine Microbial Ecology and Evolution (ECIMMEE) awards were announced today and I’m thrilled that the Bowman Lab was selected.  Our project is centered on using the SIO Pier as a unique platform for collecting ecological data at a high temporal resolution.  Consider that marine heterotrophic bacteria often have cell division times on the order of hours – even less under optimal conditions – and that entire populations can be decimated by grazing or viral attack on similarly short timescales.  A typical long term study might sample weekly; the resulting time-series is blind to the dynamics that occur on shorter time-scales.  This makes it challenging to model key ecological processes, such as the biogeochemical consequences of certain microbial taxa being active in the system.

Over the past year we’ve been slowly developing the capability to conduct high(er)-resolution time-series sampling at the SIO Pier.  This award will allow us to take these efforts to the next level and really have some fun, from an ecological observation and modeling point of view.  Our goal is to develop a sampling system that is agnostic to time, but instead observes microbial community structure and other parameters along key ecological gradients like temperature and salinity.  Following the methods in our 2017 ISME paper, we can model key processes like bacterial production from community structure and physiology data, allowing us to predict those processes for stochastic events that would be impossible to sample in person.

Sometimes it’s useful to visualize all that goes into scientific observations as a pyramid.  At the tip of this pyramid is a nice model describing our ecological processes of interest.  Way down at the base is a whole lot of head-scratching, knuckle-scraping labor to figure out how to make the initial observations to inform that model.  One of our key challenges – which seems so simple – is just getting water up to the pier deck where we can sample it in an automated fashion.  The pier deck is about 30 feet above the water, and most pumps designed to raise water to that height deliver much too much for our purposes.  We identified a pneumatic pumping system that does the job nicely, but the pump intake requires fairly intensive maintenance and a lot of effort to keep the biology off it.  Here’s a short video of me attempting to clean and reposition the (kelp covered) pump intake on Monday, shot by Gabriel Castro, a graduate student in the Marine Natural Products program at SIO (thanks Gabriel for the assist!).  Note the intense phytoplankton bloom and moderate swell, not an easy day!