Discoveries The third significant discovery in the past year of a new group of organisms in Hawaii waters signals several University of Hawaii developments to look more deeply at ocean life.
have UH diving
even deeper into
ocean life
Oceanographers are excited
over what the prospects
will bringBy Helen Altonn
haltonn@starbulletin.comThey include:
>> Completion of a $45 million Navy research ship assigned to the UH that will arrive here next spring for research in Hawaii waters and around the globe.
>> Possible use of an underwater cable going through here from New Zealand to Canada to install a bottom observatory at a site off Oahu where scientists have studied the ocean regularly for 13 years.
"It is very exciting. We're only scratching the surface. New discoveries undoubtedly will follow and new knowledge will be created and disseminated," said David Karl, UH oceanographer.
The latest find is a new group of bacteria capable of fixing nitrogen to produce essential natural fertilizers as peas and beans do on land.
"It's a very unusual kind of organism," Karl said, "a superorganism really because it can make its own nitrogen from proteins and nucleic acids from nitrogen dissolved in sea water from the atmosphere."
Only a very small subset of organisms on Earth can do this," he added, noting use of organisms to fix nitrogen for agriculture so they don't need fertilizer.
The new nitrogen-fixing organisms were discovered in the Hawaii Ocean Time-series, or HOT, program launched in 1988 about 60 miles north of Oahu. The site is called Station Aloha.
Jonathan Zehr of the University of California, Santa Cruz, led the investigations with Karl and Andrew Hansen of the UH oceanography department and their team. Their findings are reported in tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature.
The nitrogen-fixing bacteria comprise the third fundamentally new group of microorganisms found at the HOT station and reported in Nature and in Science magazine the past year. All resulted from the Station Aloha research.
"Of the entire global ocean, we probably know more about Hawaiian waters than we do about anywhere else on Earth because of these recent discoveries," Karl said. "They have fundamentally changed the way we think about the structure of the food web, the ability of the ocean to produce fish and the ability of the ocean to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."
Nitrogen accounts for nearly 80 percent of the Earth's atmosphere but most organisms can only use it when it is "fixed" to other elements, to make compounds like ammonia or nitrate.
Just as farmers fertilize their fields with fixed nitrogen to increase crop yields, he said, "The presence of these microorganisms in the sea can influence the food web with implications all the way to fishery yields."
Zehr is arriving tomorrow afternoon to collect organisms from a recent cruise to Station Aloha and analyze them at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology at Coconut Island.
The new group of organisms appear active at greater depths and over longer periods than other organisms known to fix nitrogen in the open ocean.
"This kind of shows us we've been overlooking a lot and we have a lot more to learn," Zehr said in a telephone interview.
The researchers are collaborating with Edward DeLong of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California to learn more about the organisms' genome, Zehr said. "This may provide us clues about what they need to be cultivated. But what we really want to know is what they're doing in the ocean."
Zehr added that "we need to understand these sorts of mechanisms in order to understand how ocean biology is going to respond to climate changes."
Karl said arrival of the new UH research ship next spring after sea trials in the Atlantic will provide opportunities for additional research in the HOT program.
Researchers go to the site to work once a month. They now use the Ka'imikai-O-Kanaloa, or KOK, mother ship for the Undersea Research Laboratory's submersible.
Karl said negotiations also are underway to get an unused underwater telephone cable donated for an ocean bottom observatory at Station Aloha. He and UH geophysicist Fred Duennebier and others are applying for National Science Foundation funding for the project.
Data flowing to Oahu from instruments in the sea bottom observatory, plus remotely operated vehicles collecting samples, would eliminate the need for monthly ship support, Karl said.
The purpose of the program is more basic science, Karl said, "but with it comes the potential for new applications we haven't even dreamed about." He cited implications particularly for fisheries and for global warming because marine algae absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Karl believes the nitrogen-fixing organisms may be increasing near Hawaii because of habitat changes caused by major climate cycles and their interactions with the sea.
"They are the most fundamental organisms on Earth, yet we know so little about them."
Ka Leo O Hawaii
University of Hawaii
