To Post About The Miniature Melo (Micromelo Undatus) May Seem A Bit Odd, As It Is Not A Nudibranch But

Family 2

Before...

Pets..

Health scares

Regrets?

I've already written one entry reflecting on how my family is doing without me and how I am doing without all of my family and friends. I've had to deal with a number of things that have happened at home.

Shortly before I left the United States, my grandfather faced a few health scares. By the time I left, everything had almost past, aside from some minor things. I knew there was a possibility that it could get worse while I was abroad, but I also knew that going abroad would not change any outcome.

Then, almost a month and a half ago, my family had to put one of our dogs to sleep. It was very sudden and everything happened in a few days. What made this more surprising is that our oldest dog is clearly showing his age and we all knew it was possible that I may not see him again, but our other dog is a little bit younger, but he always acts like a puppy so you would never know that he was ten years old. I even remember telling him that I didn’t have to worry about him because it seemed like he was in perfect health. Of course, I feel guilty about saying this, but there is no way I or anyone else could have known what was going to happen.

A few weeks before that, my dad broke his ankle and leg, and would be out of work for weeks. For me, the biggest impact this had was related to money, since my dad is the main bread winner in our family by a mile and it's not like we are rich or very comfortable to begin with. Now, today (Mother's Day in the U.S.), my mom called me because something else happened and my dad has been in critical condition all day and at this point, there is still a lot of uncertainty. It is harder to deal with since I am abroad, especially since a lot of people at SU have finished the semester and have been able to go home.

I think that all of this is plenty of reason to regret going abroad.....but I don't. Even though I lot has happened and is still happening, there is not much I could have done if I was home. More than likely, all of this would have still happened because stuff just happens in life. Don’t get me wrong, it is harder being abroad and being about from all of my friends and family but right now, I'm just reminding myself that stuff like this happens in life and often under the worst of circumstances (not that there is a best of circumstances).

Shark Week Takeover with photos by @BrianSkerry ! • • • Like a living wreath, small fish encircle the head of a whale shark cruising through coastal waters off Mexico’s Isla Holbox. The small fish have little to fear from this shark, since whale sharks are filter feeders, eating mainly plankton and fish eggs. Whale sharks are currently listed as ‘vulnerable’ due to human pollution and hunting, and populations remain unstable due to the slow reproductive habits of these magnificent creatures.

Swimming with whale sharks is one of my favorite experiences in the sea. Their massive size and gentle nature make for exhilarating encounters. • • • To see more shark photos and other ocean wildlife follow @BrianSkerry And keep following our feed all week to keep up with Brian Skerry’s very sharky takeover! #takeover #sharks #sharkweek #sharkweek2018 #allsharksallthetime #newenglandaquarium

Packing for a Journey into the Twilight Zone

Submitted for your consideration: A team of researchers from more than 20 institutions, boarding two research vessels, heading into the ocean’s twilight zone.

The twilight zone is a dimly lit region between 650 and 3300 feet below the surface, where we’re unfolding the mystery of how tiny ocean organisms affect our planet’s climate.

These tiny organisms – called phytoplankton – are plant-like and mostly single-celled. They live in water, taking in carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen.

Two boats, more than 100 researchers from more than 20 partner institutions, and a whole fleet of robotic explorers make up the EXport Processes in the Ocean from RemoTe Sensing (EXPORTS) team. We’re learning more about what happens to carbon dioxide after phytoplankton digest it.

The Equipment to Find Phytoplankton

Phytoplankton have predators in the ocean called zooplankton. They absorb the phytoplankton’s carbon, carrying it up the food chain. The EXPORTS mission will focus partly on how that happens in the ocean’s twilight zone, where some zooplankton live.  When phytoplankton die, sometimes their bodies sink through the same area. All of this carries carbon dioxide into the ocean’s depths and out of Earth’s atmosphere.

Counting Life

Studying the diversity of these organisms is important to better understand what’s happening to the phytoplankton as they die. Researchers from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science are using a very fine mesh net to sample water at various depths throughout the ocean to count various plankton populations.

Researchers from the University of Rhode Island are bringing the tools to sequence the DNA of phytoplankton and zooplankton to help count these organism populations, getting a closer look at what lives below the ocean’s surface.

Science at 500 Feet

Taking measurements at various depths is important, because phytoplankton, like plants, use sunlight to digest carbon dioxide. That means that phytoplankton at different levels in the ocean absorb and digest carbon differently. We’re bringing a Wirewalker, an instrument that glides up and down along a vertical wire to take in water samples all along its 500-foot long tether.

This journey to the twilight zone will take about thirty days, but we’ll be sending back dispatches from the ships. Follow along as we dive into ocean diversity on our Earth Expeditions blog: https://blogs.nasa.gov/earthexpeditions.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

None Like It Hot

By Joylette Portlock

July. Long known across the U.S. for fireworks, barbecues, and a desire to stay cool any way we can. Whether it’s air conditioning, swimming pools, beaches or popsicles, the dog days of summer are often reminders that as humans, our comfort depends on an experienced ambient temperature roughly somewhere between 59 and 77 degrees (Fahrenheit).

But what if, instead of 77, it’s a full 40 degrees more: 117 degrees, like it was in California on July 6? Or 105, like it was in Japan last week? Then, it’s more than an issue of comfort; our lives depend on finding a way to stay cool, and in fact more than a hundred people have perished in heat-related deaths globally already this year.

Life in this new age, the Anthropocene, is marked by many things, including a human-caused increase in global heat, commonly referred to as global warming, or climate change. Risk from heat (or wildfires, or floods) is no longer something we have to rely on the overwhelmingly strong scientific consensus about global warming to tell us; every year, climate change impacts are becoming more and more obvious to everyone, whether you have a degree in climate science or not.

Weather and climate are different. Weather is what happens on a day-to-day basis. Climate is the range of weather that we expect and consider normal (i.e., summer is hot) – but normal is changing.

Photo: Graph showing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and human population from We Are Nature, on display until September 2018.

We’re now up to over 400 consecutive warmer-than-average months and counting. Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s collections, which span more than 140 years, can help show these shifts in many ways. One of the most important things we can do is to make connections and show the relevance between the basic scientific principles underlying natural phenomena and the evidence all around us; between what’s happening globally and what’s happening locally.

Photo: The growth of plants collected today versus 100 years ago in the same locations, shown in We Are Nature, corroborates the observation of increasingly earlier springtime by documenting earlier maturation of these species.

The globe’s increasing heat is a result of fossil fuel use, food production, and our land use practices. We need energy and food, of course; but it’s critical that we recognize that the systems we impact also impact us. It’s not just our actions, but our interactions with the world around us that are the story. To understand what’s happening and improve our interactions with nature, we have to look at the big picture, and work to meet our needs in ways that minimize disruption to the overall system.

As summer heat waves get longer, more numerous, and more intense (and it seems the whole world is on fire, with deadly fires everywhere from California to Greece to inside the Arctic Circle) one connection is obvious: our need to be cool.

Joylette Portlock, Ph.D., is associate director of science and research at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. She is also executive director of Communitopia, a nonprofit focused on climate change communication, and holds many other roles in the community.

Fellow Study Abroad Students

Most Common Profile

Fellow Students

My Background

Adjustments

The most common profile in study abroad is students from "elite colleges, white, female, major in arts/humanities, and have highly educated parents."  Let's see how that compares to me. I am from a small liberal arts school (does that count as elite?), I am white (check), male (nope), I have majors in biology (nope) and Spanish (check), and both of my parents completed high school but never went to college so they would not be considered highly educated.  

Now, compared to my fellow study abroad students, that profile fits a bit more. Girls out number guys by slightly more than 2 to 1, most of us are white, I think there are two science majors max (including myself), we have representatives from American University and other liberal arts schools, and I know at least some of them have parents that are medical doctors or have a doctorate in the arts or humanities. This is my first time outside the United States, but I know that at least five others have spent at least a few weeks outside of the U.S. at some point in their lives. So overall, everyone else is more well-traveled than me.

In general, I usually do not think that my background as a first generation college student affects my interactions with my peers. I think it's a little awkward when someone says that their father is a doctor or that their father has a Ph.D. in Philosophy, but usually, it's just someone that comes up in a casual conversation and they do not expect me to say what my parents do.

I think that I have learned to be independent and I usually do not rely on others when navigating the college system, and I think that is probably also true for learning how to adjust to life abroad. I just need some time and I make the adjustments on my own. I'm sure that the students that have been abroad may be able to adjust easier, but I don't really know if it is that different from my fellow study abroad students.

Next month will be the one year anniversary of the PACE launch!

Sharpening Our View of Climate Change with the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem Satellite

As our planet warms, Earth’s ocean and atmosphere are changing.

Climate change has a lot of impact on the ocean, from sea level rise to marine heat waves to a loss of biodiversity. Meanwhile, greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide continue to warm our atmosphere.

NASA’s upcoming satellite, PACE, is soon to be on the case!

Set to launch on Feb. 6, 2024, the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission will help us better understand the complex systems driving the global changes that come with a warming climate.

Earth’s ocean is becoming greener due to climate change. PACE will see the ocean in more hues than ever before.

While a single phytoplankton typically can’t be seen with the naked eye, communities of trillions of phytoplankton, called blooms, can be seen from space. Blooms often take on a greenish tinge due to the pigments that phytoplankton (similar to plants on land) use to make energy through photosynthesis.

In a 2023 study, scientists found that portions of the ocean had turned greener because there were more chlorophyll-carrying phytoplankton. PACE has a hyperspectral sensor, the Ocean Color Instrument (OCI), that will be able to discern subtle shifts in hue. This will allow scientists to monitor changes in phytoplankton communities and ocean health overall due to climate change.

Phytoplankton play a key role in helping the ocean absorb carbon from the atmosphere. PACE will identify different phytoplankton species from space.

With PACE, scientists will be able to tell what phytoplankton communities are present – from space! Before, this could only be done by analyzing a sample of seawater.

Telling “who’s who” in a phytoplankton bloom is key because different phytoplankton play vastly different roles in aquatic ecosystems. They can fuel the food chain and draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to photosynthesize. Some phytoplankton populations capture carbon as they die and sink to the deep ocean; others release the gas back into the atmosphere as they decay near the surface.

Studying these teeny tiny critters from space will help scientists learn how and where phytoplankton are affected by climate change, and how changes in these communities may affect other creatures and ocean ecosystems.

Climate models are one of our most powerful tools to understand how Earth is changing. PACE data will improve the data these models rely on.

The PACE mission will offer important insights on airborne particles of sea salt, smoke, human-made pollutants, and dust – collectively called aerosols – by observing how they interact with light.

With two instruments called polarimeters, SPEXone and HARP2, PACE will allow scientists to measure the size, composition, and abundance of these microscopic particles in our atmosphere. This information is crucial to figuring out how climate and air quality are changing.

PACE data will help scientists answer key climate questions, like how aerosols affect cloud formation or how ice clouds and liquid clouds differ.

It will also enable scientists to examine one of the trickiest components of climate change to model: how clouds and aerosols interact. Once PACE is operational, scientists can replace the estimates currently used to fill data gaps in climate models with measurements from the new satellite.

With a view of the whole planet every two days, PACE will track both microscopic organisms in the ocean and microscopic particles in the atmosphere. PACE’s unique view will help us learn more about the ways climate change is impacting our planet’s ocean and atmosphere.

Stay up to date on the NASA PACE blog, and make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of sPACE!

Trip to the Osa Pennisula

Trip

Rocks

Mangrove

Stolen

On Friday at around 5:50 am., we left for our first IFSA-Butler organized trip. The bus drive was hours long, but we made stops for breakfast and to see indigenous artifacts. We stopped at the Parque de las Esferas. Here, we saw large spherical rocks that were shaped by Costa Rica’s indigenous peoples hundreds and thousands of years ago. They shaped the rocks by placing them in streams or rivers and used smalls rocks of different shapes to hit them. They were used to make maps of the stars, commerce, and many other things. Unsurprisingly, over the years many myths have been created about their origins and purposes. Some people say that they were made by UFOs or gods.

Later after lunch, we got a boat tour of the Térraba-Sierpe Mangrove, the largest mangrove in Costa Rica. We saw many species of birds: Baltimore Orioles, turkey buzzards, woodpeckers, various species of herons, and many more as well as more wildlife like a Jesus lizard (but we did not see it walk on water as it was on a tree branch) and different species of mangroves such as the red and black mangroves. After about an hour and a half boat ride, we got to the resort called the Corcovado Adventure Tent Camp. After we were settled in, we went to the beach for a little bit. After dinner, we were told to go back to our tents and make sure that everything was still there. All of my stuff was still in our tent, but when I returned to the central pavilion, I learned that the guys in the tent next to ours had both of their bags stolen, including a wallet, a laptop, an EpiPen, and most of their clothing. After about 45 minutes, a group of us went on a night walk that lasted about an hour. When we returned, Rodney, our program director, had an announcement to make. He decided that since one of the thing’s stolen was an EpiPen for an allergy to bees and the student did not have another one with him, we would leave on Saturday right away breakfast, instead of continuing with the rest of the trip as planned and returning to Heredia Sunday night. On our way home Saturday, we stopped at a bridge over el río Tárcoles to look at the crocodiles that gather in the river below.

Prionace glauca by migueldesigns It’s no exaggeration to say the blue shark is one of the most beautiful sharks swimming in the earth’s waters today. It stands out with its slim, elongated, torpedo-shaped body and beautiful swimming style. Sadly, this shark species is among the most highly fished sharks around. Humans catch it for its fins, meat, oil, and as a display animal because of its beauty. About 10 million blue sharks are killed by humans every year! As a result, this shark is listed as Near Threatened by the IUCN. Blue sharks have a deep blue back with white underbelly, large eyes, and long pectoral fins. It has a particularly strong and unique sense of smell.

Family 1

Family

Dogs

Friends

Girlfriend

Today marks the 13th day that I've been in Costa Rica (including the night I arrived at the airport). I'm adjusting to my second and permanent host family and to Heredia, and classes don’t start until tomorrow. Now that I'm here and mostly settled in, I have tried to make sure I contact friends and family in the U.S. on a regular, but not too frequent basis.

Aside from my first weekend here where I called home three days in a row (not everyone was available to talk at once) I've only texted my parents and my sister a few times or vice versa. The first time we Skyped (I did not have internet for a few days so it was not right away), our dogs were confused since they could hear me (an maybe see me) but I was not there. I miss all of the dogs, especially our new puppy, Vader, since he won't be small the next time I see him. The same is true for my family, but if I were not studying abroad, I would still be away from them since I'd be at college, and I usually don't come home until breaks. So currently, this doesn’t feel that different from a regular semester at Susquehanna, for me and them.

The same is also true for friends at home, however, not for friends at college. One of my closest friends is also studying abroad, so I would not see her even if I were at Susquehanna, but it is a bit odd not seeing my other friends. I have texted a few of them to see how their semester is going, but not too frequently. I think that at this point, this still does not feel like it will last until June, so it has not sunk in for me that I probably won't see a lot of them until August.  

Undoubtedly, the adjustment is hardest for my girlfriend. During the semester, we spend to most time with each other, so it's difficult for both of us to not see each other, including over long breaks. While the adjustment is difficult for my parents too, they have grown accustomed to not seeing me for a few weeks at a time. This is different for both of us. We've talked frequently through texting, but I am going to try to restrict calling/Skyping to a maximum of once a week (I'm going to try to do the same with my family). Since I'm still dealing with a completely new environment, it is currently harder for her, but as I grow accustomed to my routine and classes here or confront new difficult challenges, I could see it becoming more difficult for me too.

With all of that being said, I'm going to do my best to not focus on what I'm missing from the U.S. all of the time so I can focus on what I can experience here.

DISCOVERING THE GIANTS OF THE DEEP: BATHYNOMUS JAMESI

A newly discovered species of giant isopod, Bathynomus vaderi, has recently been described from the deep waters around Spratly Islands, off Vietnam. The species, named after the infamous Sith Lord, Darth Vader, due to the striking resemblance of its helmet-like head, adds to the growing diversity of the Bathynomus genus. Bathynomus vaderi is characterized by several unique features, including a parallel-margin clypeal region, a raised dorsal surface on its pleotelson, and upwardly curved pleotelson spines.

Giant isopods like Bathynomus vaderi have become an expensive delicacy in Vietnam. Until 2017, local fishermen only sold them as an incidental product at low prices, but in recent years the media has drawn the public's attention to this unusual seafood. Some even claim that it is more delicious than lobster, the "king of seafood." This new species is described from several individual found at seafood markets in Hanoi, Vietnam.

-Seafood market in Hanoi, Vietnam, selling the newly described Bathynomus jamesi. Large specimens exceeding 2 kg in weight command premium prices.

In Vietnam, Bathynomus species, are often referred to as "sea bugs". Their unique appearance and large size make them a delicacy, and they can command high prices, with larger individuals of B. vaderi reaching up to 2 kg. In recent years, demand for these creatures has risen, especially in urban centers like Hanoi and Hồ Chí Minh City, where they are displayed in restaurants and sold through online seafood markets. This growing industry highlights the continued fascination with deep-sea species and the need for ongoing research to better understand their ecology and conservation.

Main photo: Bathynomus vaderi, male, colour in life. Photo by Nguyen Thanh Son

Reference (Open Access): Ng et al., 2025. A new species of supergiant Bathynomus A. Milne-Edwards, 1879 (Crustacea, Isopoda, Cirolanidae) from Vietnam, with notes on the taxonomy of Bathynomus jamesi Kou, Chen & Li, 2017. ZooKeys.