Are estuaries traps for anthropogenic nutrients? Evidence from estuarine mesocosms

A series of estuarine mesocosms is described, where nutrient budgets were used to determine rates of nitrogen and phosphorus trapping and export as a function of nutrient input level, season, and presence or absence of sediments. Regardless of treatment or season these experimental systems exported most of the N and P that they received. Control systems with sediments retained none of the inflowing N and P during summer, and 5 % of N and 25 % of P inputs during winter. Eutrophied systems with sediments initially retained 30 % of added N and P due to increases in water column and sediment nutrient standing stocks in response to daily inorganic nutrient additions; however, after 6 mo of daily nutrient loading, these treatments retained only 5 to 15 % of nutrients added. Results of this study suggest that well-mixed estuarine systems may export to offshore waters most of the nitrogen and phosphorus that they receive. For the small percentage of nutrients that were retained, there was more storage during winter than summer, more storage in treatments without sediments, and more retention of P than N. Nitrogen losses through sediment denitrification accounted for 10 to 20 % of the N input to controls, and less than 10% of the N input to eutrophied treatments. The addition of nutrients to the eutrophied treatments resulted in increases in the N and P content of surface sediments, and the rapid deposition of an N and P-rich detrital layer on the bottom of the treatments without sediments

Benthic community metabolism in a coastal lagoon ecosystem

Measurements of benthic oxygen production and consumption at 3 stations over an annual cycle in a shallow (mean depth = 0.7 m) coastal lagoon on the Rhode Island (USA) coast provide evidence that shallow benthic communities may consume more organic matter than can be provided by impressive rates of in situ epifloral production. While sandy sediment areas in Potter Pond lagoon showed a net daytime production of about 140 g C m-2 yr-l, the more extensive areas of fine-grained sediment did not show any significant amount of net benthic daytime production annually. Moreover when nighttime respiratory costs were included, the lagoon benthos as a whole showed a net organic consumption of 30 g C m-2 yr-l in spite of a net annual daytime production rate of 50 g C m-2 yr-l. Rates of in situ oxygen uptake by fine-grained lagoon sediments in the dark were not separable from those of similar sediments in much deeper (mean = 8.6 m) Narragansett Bay. For the lagoon as a whole, the benthos consumed about 40 to 50% of the combined primary production by phytoplankton, macrophytes and benthic epiflora. This partitioning is similar to that found in deeper, plankton-based systems with completely heterotrophic bottom communities

Environmental Change Enhances Cognitive Abilities in Fish

Cichlid fish subjected to a single change in food ration early in life show enhanced learning abilities during juvenile and adult stages

Multi-messenger searches via IceCube’s high-energy neutrinos and gravitational-wave detections of LIGO/Virgo

We summarize initial results for high-energy neutrino counterpart searches coinciding with gravitational-wave events in LIGO/Virgo\u27s GWTC-2 catalog using IceCube\u27s neutrino triggers. We did not find any statistically significant high-energy neutrino counterpart and derived upper limits on the time-integrated neutrino emission on Earth as well as the isotropic equivalent energy emitted in high-energy neutrinos for each event

Measuring the Neutrino Cross Section Using 8 years of Upgoing Muon Neutrinos Observed with IceCube

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory detects neutrinos at energies orders of magnitude higher than those available to current accelerators. Above 40 TeV, neutrinos traveling through the Earth will be absorbed as they interact via charged current interactions with nuclei, creating a deficit of Earth-crossing neutrinos detected at IceCube. The previous published results showed the cross section to be consistent with Standard Model predictions for 1 year of IceCube data. We present a new analysis that uses 8 years of IceCube data to fit the ν$_{μ}$ absorption in the Earth, with statistics an order of magnitude better than previous analyses, and with an improved treatment of systematic uncertainties. It will measure the cross section in three energy bins that span the range 1 TeV to 100 PeV. We will present Monte Carlo studies that demonstrate its sensitivity