After arriving in Fairbanks and starting to get the lab set up it was time for my first trip to Bermuda! Some of my past work found that under ocean acidification, the 'helper' bacterium Alteromonas decreased it's help to Prochlorococcus (the most abudant phytplankton on earth). So I have a project to study whether this will happen in the real ocean. Prochlorococcus is the dominant phytoplankter around Bermuda and much of the globe. Prochlorococcus depends on 'helper' bacteria to deal with oxidative stress in the sunlit ocean.
Our goal is to find out how many other 'helpers' there are and if they can compensate for the increased oxidative stress we expect Prochlorococcus to experience in the future ocean. I went out on the R.V. Atlantic Explorer
