{"id":1525,"date":"2026-03-25T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/currents.bigelow.org\/?p=1525"},"modified":"2026-04-01T15:12:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T15:12:17","slug":"oh-what-a-tangled-web","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/currents.bigelow.org\/?p=1525","title":{"rendered":"Oh, What a Tangled Web"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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At Bigelow Laboratory<\/strong>, we know that the smallest things can have the biggest impact on the ocean ecosystem. A multi-institutional team, led by the University of Rhode Island<\/strong> and featuring our researchers, is helping show just how important some of these tiny animals called copepods are for shuttling energy and nutrients across the ocean food web.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team has spent the last several years using advanced laboratory and field methods to understand how the biological communities of the surface and seafloor are connected in the Gulf of Maine<\/strong> and how that relationship \u2014 and the larger marine food web \u2014 adapts as environmental conditions change. The project has relied on some unique datasets, including coral skeletons that preserve a record of growth like tree rings, lots of tiny copepod poop pellets, and a biological archive that has preserved samples of common copepod species going back 50 years.<\/p>\n\n\n