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» Go to news mainMedia opportunity: Single‑celled organisms with superpowers shown to buffer fertilizer input into the world's oceans by storing large amounts of nitrogen and phosphate and fighting harms to the marine environment
Scientists studying microscopic organisms whose fossil records date back 500 million years have found that they may absorb nitrogen and phosphate from coastal waters at a previously unimagined extent, potentially providing a valuable tool to guard against harmful nutrient loading that can lead to algae blooms and marine hypoxia.
Foraminifera are microscopic organisms found throughout the world's ocean that are known to absorb and remove nitrogen from coastal waters. New research by a team from the University of Hamburg, Dalhousie University and the German GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre now shows that "forams" remove phosphate as well.
Both nitrogen and phosphate are essential nutrients for life in the ocean, but excess amounts from such things as fertilizer runoff can be harmful to the marine environment.
Their findings are published today (Jan. 15) in the journal, Nature.
Lead author Dr. Nicolaas Glock of the University of Hamburg visited Dalhousie as an Ocean Frontier Institute visiting scholar and worked with Dalhousie Oceanography professors Dr. Markus Kienast and Dr. Christopher Algar, and former Dalhousie graduate student Dr. Subhadeep Rakshit, to isolate foraminifera from the Bedford Basin in Halifax.
By shock-freezing the foraminifera, they could break them open and measure their internal nutrient stores, which showed that these organisms were storing large amounts of both nitrogen and phosphate. The nitrogen findings were published last year in the journal Geochimica Cosmochimica Acta, and indicated that “forams” were the major sink for nitrogen in the basin. That study was authored by Dr. Rakshit, who was a Dalhousie graduate student at the time and is now a post-doctoral scientist at Princeton University.
Dr. Glock combined the phosphate measurements from the Bedford Basin with others from the Wadden Sea, Peruvian and Japanese coastal waters, and from a depth of 2,000 metres at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to demonstrate the widespread occurrence of this phosphate storage phenomenon.
The team calculated that in the Wadden Sea -- a shallow coastal sea off the coast of Germany -- a single species of foraminifera (Ammonia confertistesta) stores the amount of phosphate equal to five per cent of the fertilizer applied to German crops each year.
The surprising result suggests that because these single-celled organisms are so widespread and occur in huge quantities, the amount of phosphate they take up is very large overall. When the foraminifera die and form new sediments, they might also permanently remove some of the phosphate they have absorbed from the seawater, making them an important sink for this substance.
Drs. Algar and Kienast are available to discuss their research and how without this single-celled organism, the coastal ocean would likely be even more heavily overfertilized with phosphate. -30-
Media contact:
Alison Auld
Senior Research Reporter
Dalhousie University
Cell: 1-902-220-0491
Email: alison.auld@dal.ca
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