New USF study identifies virus that causes red tide
The study, published in the American Society for Microbiology's journal mSphere, involved researchers testing water samples from red tide blooms off southwest Florida in which they found several viruses, including a new species that is present in red tide blooms.
This discovery shines a light on the environmental factors that cause red tide blooms to grow and marks an important step towards better understanding the virus.
'We know that viruses play an important role in the dynamics of harmful algal blooms, but we haven't known what viruses might be associated with Karenia brevis blooms,' said Jean Lim, the study's lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at the USF College of Marine Science (CMS). 'Now that we've identified several viruses in red tide blooms, we can work to determine which viruses might have an influence on these events.'
Racers excited to hit the track for NASCAR at Homestead-Miami
Red tide blooms are a naturally occurring event driven by various factors such as ocean circulation, nutrient concentration, and climate change.
Karenia Brevis, the single-celled organism responsible for red tide blooms, can not only kill marine life but also cause respiratory issues ultimately impacting coastal economies that predominantly rely on tourism and fishing.
The findings of this study could not only help predict bloom cycles but perhaps even provide environmentally-friendly ways to manage red tide blooms.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Miami Herald
3 days ago
- Miami Herald
How strong will that Gulf hurricane get? Hidden hot water, river flow may be key
Hurricane forecasting has improved dramatically over recent decades, but there's one major phenomenon that can still throw a wrench into even the most accurate forecasts — rapid intensification. That's what scientists call it when a tropical storm or hurricane's sustained wind speed increases at least 35 mph within 24 hours, and it happens for nearly all Category 4 and 5 storms. Researchers have some idea of the ingredients necessary for a storm to quickly strengthen like that, but it's a less precise guess than many other elements of hurricane forecasting. However, new research from the University of South Florida continues to chip away at the mysteries surrounding rapid intensification, especially in the Gulf of Mexico, by helping identify previously hidden pockets of hot water that could help feed storms. One study, published in February in the journal Environmental Research Letters, found that a plume of hot freshwater, floating on top of the denser, slightly cooler saltwater in the Gulf, could have been key to Hurricane Idalia's rapid strengthening in 2023. Researchers found that shortly before Hurricane Idalia jumped from a Category 1 hurricane to Category 4, it passed over this hot puddle of freshwater, and they determined that this provided the burgeoning hurricane a speed boost. Chuanmin Hu, a professor of oceanography at the USF College of Marine Science and an author of the study, said the discovery was a coincidence, a matter of the right devices at the right place at the right time. They initially set out to study this plume of freshwater, an annual occurrence in the Gulf fed from various freshwater rivers, including the Mississippi, over red tide concerns. But the team's slow-moving research gliders turned out to be perfectly placed to catch the incoming hurricane. And they showed, Hu said, that the deep layer of warm freshwater served as a power source for Idalia. This freshwater plume is a normal thing to see in the Gulf, but the research suggests that in 2023, it was deeper and larger than anything in recent history, potentially because of an intense amount of rain that fell on the Southwest in the months previous. 'Even right now, there's a plume following almost the same path, but the extent is much smaller and the duration may be shorter,' Hu said. 'This extensive long lasting plume [in 2023] was a record in the past 20 years.' READ MORE: What happens when hurricanes rapidly intensify? Researchers can easily track the outlines of the annual plume via satellite, but without the gliders, which can sample up to 200 meters below the surface, it's hard to know how deep the plume is. The gliders are funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Hu suggested that their continued use could provide forecasters another tool for predicting rapid intensification. 'These are really, really important measurements that help hurricane studies, and I hope they will continue in the future,' Hu said. Another USF-led study examining the same region of the Gulf also found a connection between unique ocean circulation and rapid intensification. The paper, published in December in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that in 2022, when Hurricane Ian powered up over waters near the Florida coast, it found waters warmer than usual — both at the sea surface and deeper below. Yonggang Liu, an associate professor at the University of South Florida and lead author of the study, said that water was hotter than usual because the region hadn't experienced a 'flushing' current like it normally does, so the waters were hotter and more stagnant than usual. Liu said his team analyzed 27 years of water temperature history from a series of buoys placed in the region and found that the deeper waters were warmer than normal when Ian plowed through. Usually, the sea surface is warmest and waters get cooler the deeper you go. That means that when Hurricane Ian moved over the Gulf, it churned up ever hotter water, fueling the storm even further, potentially giving it the boost it needed to jump from Category 3 to Category 5 as it closed in on Florida. 'The important part of those subsurface water temperatures is you can't detect it from satellites,' Liu said. 'That should be improved. The buoys are essential in this case.' Liu's team made a publicly available dashboard to display the data from those buoys. This month, it shows good news, he said. Deeper waters are running only slightly above average, a much lower figure than researchers saw with Hurricane Ian. That could be because this year, unlike in 2022, the Gulf Loop Current grew wide enough to hit a 'pressure point' that Liu's team pinpointed on the west Florida shelf. When the current grows broad enough to hit that spot, the paper found, it flushes cooler water up and down the west coast of Florida, cutting off a potential food source for would-be storms. 'The entire shelf will be replaced with cooler water from offshore origins,' Liu said. 'That kind of circulation was not seen during the last four years in the summer, only briefly, not persistently. This year is different.' Liu believes that expanding the buoy network up and down the coast of Florida, or even in geographically similar areas like North Carolina's coast, could provide a helpful tool for forecasters trying to find previously hidden pockets of hot water that could fuel storms passing through the area. 'More observations and monitoring of the subsurface is critical,' he said.
Atlantic
23-07-2025
- Atlantic
The Sea Slug Defying Biological Orthodoxy
This week, a friend sent me our horoscope—we're both Gemini—from Seven Days, a beloved Vermont weekly, because, improbably, it was about the sea slug I'd been telling her about just days before. 'The sea slug Elysia chlorotica is a small, unassuming creature that performs a remarkable feat: It eats algae and steals its chloroplasts, then incorporates them into its own body,' the horoscope explained. Years ago I had incorporated this fact into my own view of the world, and it had changed my understanding of the rules of biology. This particular slug starts life a brownish color with a few red dots. Then it begins to eat from the hairlike strands of the green algae Vaucheria litorea: It uses specialized teeth to puncture the alga's wall, and then it slurps out its cells like one might slurp bubble tea, each bright-green cellular boba moving up the algal straw. The next part remains partially unexplained by science. The slug digests the rest of the cell but keeps the chloroplasts—the plant organelles responsible for photosynthesis—and distributes these green orbs through its branched gut. Somehow, the slug is able to run the chloroplasts itself and, after sucking up enough of them, turns a brilliant green. It appears to get all the food it needs for the rest of its life by way of photosynthesis, transforming light, water, and air into sugar, like a leaf. The horoscope took this all as a metaphor: Something I'd 'absorbed from another' is 'integrating into your deeper systems,' it advised. 'This isn't theft, but creative borrowing.' And in that single line, the horoscope writer managed to explain symbiosis—not a metaphor at all, but an evolutionary mechanism that may be more prevalent across biology than once thought. Elysia chlorotica is a bewitching example of symbiosis. It is flat, heart-shaped, and pointed at the tail, and angles itself toward the sun. Its broad surface is grooved by a web of veins, like a leaf's is. Ignore its goatish head, and you might assume this slug was a leaf, if a particularly gelatinous one. Sidney Pierce, a marine biologist retired from the University of South Florida, remembers his surprise when a grad student brought a specimen into his office in the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, on Cape Cod, more than two decades ago. Photosynthesis requires specialized equipment and chemistry, which animals simply do not have—'yet here was an animal that's figured out how to do it,' he told me. He spent the next 20-odd years trying to find the mechanism. 'Unfortunately, I didn't get all the way to the end,' he said. No one has, as my colleague Katherine J. Wu has written. The algae and the slug may have managed some kind of gene transfer, and over time, produced a new way of living, thanks not to slow, stepwise evolution—the random mutation within a body—but by the wholesale transfer of a piece of code. A biological skill leaked out of one creature into another. All of us are likely leakier than we might assume. After all, every cell with a nucleus, meaning all animal and plant cells, has a multigenetic heritage. Mitochondria—the organelles in our cells responsible for generating energy—are likely the product of an ancient symbiosis with a distant ancestor and a microbe, and have their own separate DNA. So we are walking around with the genetic material of some other ancient life form suffused in every cell. And the earliest ancestor of all plants was likely the product of a fusion between a microbe and a cyanobacterium; plants' photosynthesizing organelles, too, have distinct DNA. Lynn Margulis, the biologist who made the modern case for this idea, was doubted for years until new genetic techniques proved her correct. Her conviction about the symbiotic origins of mitochondria and chloroplasts was a monumental contribution to cell biology. But Margulis took her theory further; in her view, symbiosis was the driving force of evolution, and many entities were likely composites. Evolution, then, could be traced not only through random mutation, but by combination. 'Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking. Life forms multiplied and complexified by co-opting others, not just by killing one another,' she wrote, with her son, in 1986. This remains pure conjecture, and an exaggeration of the role of symbiosis beyond what mainstream evolutionary theory would support; random mutation is still considered the main driver of speciation. Yet more scientists now wonder if symbiosis may have played a larger role in the heritage of many species than we presently understand. Phillip Cleves, a geneticist at the Carnegie Institution for Science who studies the symbiotic relationship between corals and their algae symbionts, told me how, as an undergraduate, he was blown away by the fact that corals' alliance with algae made possible ecosystems—coral reefs—that support a quarter of all known marine life. The algae cells live, whole, inside coral cells, and photosynthesize as normal, sustaining the coral in nutrient-poor tropical waters. 'I realize now that that type of interaction between organisms is pervasive across the tree of life,' he said. It's probable that the ancestors of all eukaryotes were more influenced by bacteria in their environments than modern evolutionary theory has accounted for. 'All animals and plants likely require interactions with microbes, often in strong, persistent symbiotic associations,' Margaret McFall-Ngai, a leading researcher of the role of microbes in animal development, wrote in 2024. These interactions, she argued, are so fundamental to life that the animal immune system should perhaps be thought of as a sort of management system for our many microbial symbionts. Although biology has been slow to recognize symbiosis's significance, she thinks this line of research should now take center stage, and could alter how all stripes of biologists think about their work. Cleves, too, sees himself as working to build a new field of science, by training people on how to ask genetic questions about symbiotic relationships in nature: When I called him, he was preparing to teach a four-week course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole on exactly that. Genomic research has only relatively recently been cheap enough to apply it routinely and broadly to all sorts of creatures, but now scientists can more easily ask: How do animals' interactions with microbes shape the evolution of individual species? And how does that change dynamics in an ecosystem more broadly? Elysia chlorotica is also a lesson in how easily the boundaries between an organism and its environment can be traversed. 'Every time an organism eats, a whole wad of DNA from whatever it's eating passes through the animal. So DNA gets transferred all the time from species to species,' Pierce told me. Most times it doesn't stick, but on the rare occasions when it does, it can reroute the fate of a species. 'I think it happens more than it's recognized, but a lot of times it's hard to recognize because you don't know what you're looking for. But in these slugs, it's pretty obvious,' he said. They're bright green. Still, attempts to understand what is happening inside Elysia chlorotica have mostly fallen short. Scientists such as Pierce presume that, over time, elements of the algal genome have been transferred to the slug, allowing it to run photosynthesis, yet they have struggled to find evidence. 'It's very hard to find a gene if you don't know what you're looking for,' Pierce said—plus, slug DNA is too muddled to parse a lot of the time. Slugs are full of mucus, which can ruin samples, and because the chloroplasts are embedded inside the slug cells, many samples of slug DNA end up picking up chloroplast DNA too. After years of trying, and at least one false start by a different lab, Pierce and his colleagues did manage to find a gene in the slug that was involved with chloroplast repair, hinting that a genetic transfer had occurred, and offering a clue as to how the animal manages to keep the plant organelles alive. But another research team showed that related species of photosynthesizing slugs can survive for months deprived of sunlight and actual food: They may simply be hardy. Why, then, if not to make nutrients, might the slugs be photosynthesizing? Perhaps for camouflage. Or perhaps they're stashing chloroplasts, which themselves contain useful fats and proteins, as food reserves. (Pierce, for one, is skeptical of those explanations.) Whatever benefit Elysia chlorotica derives from the chloroplasts, there couldn't be a leakier creature. It crosses the divide between plant and animal, one species and another, and individual and environment. I first read about the slug in a book titled Organism and Environment by Sonia Sultan, an evolutionary ecologist at Wesleyan University, in which she forwards the argument that we should be paying more attention to how the environment influences the way creatures develop, and how those changes are passed generationally, ultimately influencing the trajectory of species. While Elysia chlorotica is an extreme example of this, a version of it happens to us, and our bodies, all the time. Encounters with the bacteria around us reshape our microbiomes, which in turn affect many aspects of our health. Encounters with pollution can reroute the trajectory of our health and even, in some cases, the health of our offspring. Researchers think access to healthy foods—a factor of our environments—can modify how our genes are expressed, improving our lives in ways that scientists are just beginning to understand. We are constantly taking our environment in, and it is constantly transforming us.
The Hill
19-07-2025
- The Hill
Astronomer CEO resigns after Coldplay video goes viral
TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — The CEO of Astronomer, a New York-based tech company, resigned Saturday following speculation surrounding a moment caught on camera during a Coldplay concert in Massachusetts this week. A viral video showed a couple quickly hiding from the camera after being shown on the big screen at a Coldplay concert at Gillette Stadium on Wednesday. Coldplay front man Chris Martin teased the two after witnessing their reaction, saying: 'Either they're having an affair or they're really shy.' Not long after, rumors began to circulate, connecting the couple to the tech company. Astronomer first addressed the rumors Friday by releasing a statement on social media platform X, notifying that the CEO of their company, Andy Byron, had been placed on leave while an investigation was launched. On Saturday, the company released a follow-up statement announcing that Andy Byron had tendered his resignation and its board had accepted. 'Before this week, we were known as a pioneer in the DataOps space, helping data teams power everything from modern analytics to production AI. While awareness of our company may have changed overnight, our product and our work for our customers have not. We're continuing to do what we do best: helping our customers with their toughest data and AI problems.'
