Lunch and Learn: Environmental Issues & Challenges in the 21st Century

If you live or work in Woods Hole, you’ve seen the portents. A heavy rainstorm surges Atlantic Ocean waves over the seawall in Waterfront Park, soaking the grass on their way toward Water Street. The Marine Biological Laboratory’s docks on Eel Pond submerge. The corner of Gardiner Road and Millfield Street floods, and water streams down the roadways.

Flooding in Woods Hole Village is a present-day reality that is only projected to increase in frequency and severity over the next century, as detailed in a report released this week by the Woods Hole Group (WHG). The report presents probabilistic scenarios for sea-level rise, storm-surge inundation, and habitat change (such as salt marsh transforming to open water) by the years 2030, 2050, and 2070 in Woods Hole, as well as concepts for adaptation planning.
 

Waves from Great Harbor crash over the seawall in Waterfront Park, Woods Hole, February 2020.
The video was taken from MBL’s Candle House building on Water Street.

 
Three Woods Hole science institutions with critical infrastructure at risk from climate-change related impacts commissioned the report -- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Northeast Fisheries Science Center.

“Three world-class oceanographic institutions are located within a half-mile stretch of the aptly named Water Street in Woods Hole, and while each institution has its own self-interests, we realized that better outcomes could be achieved by working together,” said Rob Munier, WHOI’s vice president for marine facilities and operations, at a public symposium that preceded the report’s release (a videorecording is here).

Leaders from the institutions, including MBL’s Chief Operating Officer Paul Speer and Director of Facilities and Services Marie Russell, worked with the Woods Hole Group to develop “asset-level, district-level, and community-level strategies that can form the basis for future discussion and planning, ultimately resulting in the long-term viability and resilience of Woods Hole’s scientific organizations, working waterfronts, and the community itself,” the report states.

The vision is for the institutions to partner with each other, “with other Woods Hole village entities, and with the Town of Falmouth to keep Woods Hole working.”

Assessing Risk

For its vulnerability assessments and adaptation concepts in Woods Hole, the WHG used the same approach that it has developed for the State of Massachusetts. Boston and Cambridge are in advanced stages of adaptation design using the WHG’s approach; other municipalities have adopted it as well, including the Town Falmouth.

This approach models the probability of flooding with very high resolution, down to 5- to 10-foot parcels; identifies key infrastructure at risk; and develops concepts and designs for resiliency and adaptation.

Woods Hole village sits at low elevation, said Kirk Bosma of the Woods Hole Group at the public symposium, and therefore has vulnerabilities. “The wonderful aspects of Woods Hole that connect it to the sea also become an issue,” he said. Relative sea level rose by ~ 10 inches in Woods Hole between 1932 and 2019, according to NOAA measurements, and this trend is expected to continue as the ocean expands due to warming and glacial ice melt.

That means even “sunny day predictions,” in the absence of storms, anticipate increased tidal flooding in Woods Hole. But the WHG approach also models the risk of flooding during storms, nor’easters and hurricanes, when you have “waves, wind blowing things in different directions,” Bosma said. “It’s a dynamic model that incorporates a lot of the processes that go into climate change and produces more information than, ‘are you wet or not’,” he said.

These forecasts allowed MBL, WHOI and NOAA to see which particular assets are at highest risk of “critical elevation flooding” (which prevents them from functioning) through the 2030, 2050, and 2070 planning horizons. They then worked with WHG to determine the consequences of flooding for each building or asset – how catastrophic it would be for the institution, both financially and to carry out its mission. Scores were then assigned to each asset (risk = probability of flooding x consequences of flooding), allowing the institutions to prioritize in their resiliency planning.

MBL’s Risks

For MBL, the buildings at highest risk and consequence of coastal storm flooding are clustered around Eel Pond: Lillie Laboratory, the Marine Resources Center and its Collection Support Facility, Swope Conference Center, and Candle House.

“The area around Eel Pond is very high risk because those buildings count, and the likelihood of flooding is fairly high,” says Paul Speer.

The report proposes a concept for protecting these high-priority MBL assets that is incremental and modular, starting with present needs and adjusting over time.

Most immediately, says Speer, Lillie’s building systems (mechanical, electrical) need to be elevated from the basement, out of the flood zone. The same is true for Swope. Fortunately, these vulnerabilities were identified prior to the WHG’s report and some design planning has taken place.

Aerial photo of Woods Hole, Great Harbor and Eel Pond (lower left). MBL buildings located around Eel Pond identified as being at higher risk of flooding include Lillie Laboratory (brick complex at center), the Marine Resources Center to the left of Lillie, and the grey Swope Conference Center complex at far right. Credit: Marine Biological Laboratory

Woods Hole Vulnerabilities

Other than isolated areas of high elevation, including MBL parcels near the intersection of North and Albatross Streets, “the rest of Woods Hole village, including all of NOAA’s property, the majority of MBL’s buildings, and WHOI’s waterfront facilities are vulnerable to storm surge under current conditions and will be increasingly exposed as sea level rises and storms intensify,” the report states. “Flood probabilities at campus locations along Albatross Street, Water Street and Eel Pond are currently in the range of 5-10 percent, but could increase to 10-20 percent by 2030, to 50-100 percent by 2050, and to 100 percent by 2070. These projections suggest that … much of Woods Hole Village could be inundated by the annual (100 percent chance event) storm by 2070.”

A University of Chicago student conducts field work in Little Sippewissett Marsh for a course at MBL. The WHG report predicts that large expanses of existing wetlands north of Eel Pond will transition to open water by the end of the century. Credit: David Mark Welch

The undeveloped areas of Woods Hole are also predicted to transform. As sea-level rises, salt marshes migrate inward if there are no barriers to their doing so. The WHG’s projections suggest that up to 50 acres of upland area in Woods Hole may be lost to wetland migration by the end of the century, and that large expanses of existing wetlands will transition to open water north of Eel Pond.

Working Together

While the report is certainly sobering, it is no cause for despair, Bosma said at the symposium. These are projections, first of all; a variety of sea-level and storm conditions can occur. “And there are things you can start to do, to think about an opportunity to change your relationship with the waterfront [in Woods Hole] and still save the connection between the people and the water,” he said.

“Successfully managing the long-term impacts of sea level rise and storm-induced coastal flooding is key to the MBL’s future,” Speer said. “For a number of reasons, our location along the water’s edge in Woods Hole is key to what we do.”

Speer reaffirms the wisdom of finding community-level solutions to adverse climate change impacts. “Anything we do that is disconnected from the long-term view on whole-village and Falmouth solutions ultimately will not work,” he said. “We could spend a lot of time, effort and money hardening our buildings, but if we cannot access our campus by town roads, our actions will not help us that much. The results of this first round of cooperation on this report have been critical, not only to refine ideas we have in mind for the MBL campus, but for starting to think through how we collectively need to act going forward.”

Homepage photo: The MBL’s Supply Department during the 1938 Hurricane.

Contact: dkenney@mbl.edu; 508-685-3525

WOODS HOLE, Mass. -- The dialogue between neurons is of critical importance for all nervous system activities, from breathing to sensing, thinking to running. Yet neuronal communication is so fast, and at such small scale, that it is exceedingly difficult to explain precisely how it occurs. A preliminary observation in the Neurobiology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), enabled by a custom imaging system, has led to a clear understanding of how neurons communicate with each other by modulating the “tone” of their signal, which previously had eluded the field. The report, led by Grant F. Kusick and Shigeki Watanabe of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is published this week in Nature Neuroscience.

In 2016 Watanabe, then on the Neurobiology course faculty, introduced students to the debate over how many synaptic vesicles can fuse in response to one action potential (see this 2-minute video for a quick brush-up on neurotransmission). To probe this controversy, they used a “zap-and-freeze” imaging technology conceived by co-authors M. Wayne Davis, Watanabe and Erik Jorgensen, and built by Leica for testing in the Neurobiology course. They zapped a neuron with electricity to induce an action potential, then quickly froze the neuron and took an image. They saw multiple vesicles fusing at once at many synapses, the first novel finding of this Nature Neuroscience report.

Shigeki Watanabe, left, and Erik Jorgensen with the flash-and-freeze imaging system, a forerunner to zap-and-freeze. Both systems were developed in the Jorgensen lab and are descendants of the 1979 “freeze slammer” invented by John Heuser, Tom Reese and colleagues. Credit: Cveta Tomova

But there was more. Back at Johns Hopkins, Kusick and Watanabe decided to walk through the neurotransmission process with zap-and-freeze, taking images every 3 milliseconds after the action potential. That’s when they found an answer to an even larger question – how do neurons change the tone of their neurotransmission signal?

At any given time, only a few synaptic vesicles are in “docked” position, meaning loaded and ready to release neurotransmitter. Immediately after an action potential, the number of docked vesicles decreases by 40 percent, so after 2 to 3 action potentials, the docked vesicles would be depleted. (That is, their signal or “voice” would become weaker and weaker, as more action potentials are induced.) But they found that, within 14 milliseconds following an action potential, new vesicles are swiftly recruited to the docked pool that can fuse and release neurotransmitter, and this recruitment is transient such that neurotransmission can be strong or weak on a millisecond time scale. This is the first close-up look at neural communication that adds up from a temporal perspective.

“What this means is that we have identified a mechanism that neurons use to communicate through intonations,” Watanabe says. “Each docked vesicle is like a word that neurons can use for communication at any given moment. It has been known for decades that neurons can speak more than a few words at a time, and they can also change the tone of these words. The question was how. We’ve shown that neurons continuously bring in more words, but by simply changing the number of vesicles, they can raise or lower the voice. If you are asking a question, you will raise the intonation at the end of a sentence – neurons do so by changing the number of docked vesicles ready to go.”

Synapses before (left) and after stimulation, with arrows showing the moment of neurons talking to each other (fusion of synaptic vesicles). Credit: MBL Neurobiology course students Kristina Lippmann, Kadidia Adula, Thien Vu, and Eddie Hujber

The “zap and freeze” electron microscopy technology is  the 21^st-century version of the “freeze slammer” developed by John Heuser, Tom Reese et al., and used at MBL nearly 50 years ago to demonstrate how neurons communicate with each other.

The MBL Neurobiology course faculty and students co-authoring this paper include Jorgensen and Davis (University of Utah), Kristina Lippmann (University of Leipzg), Kandidia P. Adula (University of California, Los Angeles), and Edward J. Hujber and Thien Vu (University of Utah). Watanabe, who was a 2014 Grass Fellow at the MBL, returns nearly annually to teach in the Neurobiology course and as a Whitman Center scientist.

Left to right: Grant Kusick (Watanabe lab), MBL Neurobiology course students Christine Prater and Stephen Lee, and Shigeki Watanabe in Woods Hole in 2019.

Citation:

Grant F. Kusick, M. Chin, S. Raychaudhuri, K. Lippmann, K. P. Adula, E.J. Hujber, T. Vu, M.W. Davis, E.M. Jorgensen, S. Watanabe (2020) Synaptic vesicles transiently dock to refill release sites. Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/s41593-020-00716-1

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The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is dedicated to scientific discovery – exploring fundamental biology, understanding marine biodiversity and the environment, and informing the human condition through research and education. Founded in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in 1888, the MBL is a private, nonprofit institution and an affiliate of the University of Chicago.

By Raleigh McElvery

Hydra in control media before contraction (left) and during contraction (right). Credit: Wataru Yamamoto

Hydra vulgaris, a tiny, tentacled, freshwater organism, uses “nets” of neurons dispersed throughout its tube-like body to coordinate stretching, contracting, somersaulting, and feeding movements. This simple nervous system is one reason that Hydra is well suited for studying how electrical activity translates into motion.

In a study published in eNeuro, a duo from Columbia University and the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) has begun to crack the neural code behind Hydra’s simplest behavior, called  contraction bursts (when the torso shrinks down and expands outward, over and over again). The scientists found that the concentration of dissolved particles in the surrounding water — a property known as osmolarity — affects the activity of a neural circuit in one of Hydra’s nerve nets, which can trigger a specific set of muscle cells to contract the torso.

“One by one, we want to decipher the neural and muscular activity behind each of Hydra’s behaviors,” says senior author and MBL Whitman Center Fellow, Rafael Yuste of Columbia University. “This paper is the beginning of our journey.”

Yuste and first author Wataru Yamamoto conducted their experiments in Woods Hole during the summers of 2017, 2018 and 2019, in consultation with their MBL Hydra Lab research consortium. They used whole-body calcium imaging to visualize Hydra’s neurons and muscles, and tested whether tweaking various environmental conditions such as water temperature, body size, nutritional state, and osmolarity would affect contractions. They were surprised to find that just one of those parameters, osmolarity, had an impact.

Boosting the concentration of sugar particles in the water triggered fewer contractions and decreased activity in the “contraction burst” (CB) neural circuit as well as in one set of muscles. Lowering particle concentration had the opposite effect, increasing cellular activity and contractions. Although additional experiments are needed to confirm their theory, the researchers propose that CB neurons respond to changes in osmolarity by altering muscle activity, which in turn influences contraction frequency.

Five Hydra freely behaving in 50mM sucrose (high osmolarity) solution.
This video is sped up 300-fold. Credit: Wataru Yamamoto

Reacting to changes in particle concentration could mean the difference between life and death for Hydra — especially if salt is involved. As freshwater dwellers lacking advanced excretory systems, Hydra are not well-equipped to maintain the proper balance of salinity inside and outside their bodies. Water is constantly flowing in and out of their gastrovascular cavities, and too much internal salty solution causes them to balloon and literally explode. The researchers surmise that Hydra contract in response to high osmolarity to “wring” themselves out and expel excess water.

In addition to affecting contractions, osmolarity also influenced how often Hydra detached and repositioned its tube foot, likely preparing to move to a new location. Yamamoto plans to continue to investigate how and why this happens. He hopes his line of inquiry will eventually help decode a more complex behavior: somersaulting, when Hydra flips tentacles-over-tube foot, like a circus acrobat.

Hydra ectoderm muscle activity during contraction in control media.
The animal was allowed to move between coverslips in the mounted configuration.
This video is sped up 20-fold. Credit: Wataru Yamamoto

Homepage photo: Freely behaving Hydra exhibiting different motor behaviors (elongation, contraction, somersaulting). Credit: Wataru Yamamoto

Citation:

Wataru Yamamoto and Rafael Yuste (2020) Whole-Body Imaging of Neural and Muscle Activity during Behavior in Hydra vulgaris: Effect of Osmolarity on Contraction Bursts. eNeuro, DOI: 10.1523/ENEURO.0539-19.2020

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The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is dedicated to scientific discovery – exploring fundamental biology, understanding marine biodiversity and the environment, and informing the human condition through research and education. Founded in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in 1888, the MBL is a private, nonprofit institution and an affiliate of the University of Chicago.

2019 Nikon Small World Virtual Exhibit