Annual Review of Marine Science最新文献

Rapidly changing ocean conditions are resulting in changes in marine species and across entire ecosystems that, in turn, affect communities and individuals who rely on these resources for their livelihoods, culture, and sustenance. Marine social science, an emerging field that embraces diverse methods to understand human-ocean relationships, is increasingly called on to contribute to transdisciplinary ocean science that can inform the evidence-based policy and management needed to address these changes. Here, we review the state of marine social science as a growing field of study. First, we outline the history of marine social science, including the emergence of the field and the social science disciplines and community it encompasses. We then discuss current marine social science research themes as a framework to understand key ocean issues, which is followed by a commentary on the future of marine social science research.

The relationship between climate and human evolution is complex, and the causal mechanisms remain unknown. Here, we review and synthesize what is currently known about climate forcings on African landscapes, focusing mainly on the last 4 million years. We use information derived from marine sediment archives and data-numerical climate model comparisons and integration. There exists a heterogeneity in pan-African hydroclimate changes, forced by a combination of orbitally paced, low-latitude fluctuations in insolation; polar ice volume changes; tropical sea surface temperature gradients; the Walker circulation; and possibly greenhouse gases. Pan-African vegetation changes do not follow the same pattern, which is suggestive of additional influences, such as CO₂ and temperature. We caution against reliance on temporal correlations between global or regional climate, environmental changes, and human evolution and briefly proffer some ideas on how pan-African climate trends could help create novel conceptual frameworks to determine the causal mechanisms of associations between climate/habitat change and hominin evolution.

Estrogens are a group of endocrine disruptors that are recognized as a threat to the world's ecosystems and are easily transported through aquatic systems from mainly anthropogenic sources. To illustrate this growing problem, we have compiled a global overview of measured concentrations of natural and synthetic estrogens restricted to freshwater systems (lakes, rivers, and lagoons) and marine coastal and open ocean environments, focusing on estrone (E1), 17$upbeta$-estradiol (E2), estriol (E3), and 17$upalpha$-ethinylestradiol (EE2). We found that the cumulative risk quotient is high at 65% of 400 sampled sites, highlighting that estrogen pollution is a major environmental concern. Our investigation revealed that almost no information is available on the concentration levels of E1, E2, E3, and EE2 for the open ocean areas. However, their occurrence in all systems, including open seas, suggests that estrogens are not completely degraded during transport to and within the environment and may be more persistent than previously thought.

Scenarios to stabilize global climate and meet international climate agreements require rapid reductions in human carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, often augmented by substantial carbon dioxide removal (CDR) from the atmosphere. While some ocean-based removal techniques show potential promise as part of a broader CDR and decarbonization portfolio, no marine approach is ready yet for deployment at scale because of gaps in both scientific and engineering knowledge. Marine CDR spans a wide range of biotic and abiotic methods, with both common and technique-specific limitations. Further targeted research is needed on CDR efficacy, permanence, and additionality as well as on robust validation methods-measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification-that are essential to demonstrate the safe removal and long-term storage of CO₂. Engineering studies are needed on constraints including scalability, costs, resource inputs, energy demands, and technical readiness. Research on possible co-benefits, ocean acidification effects, environmental and social impacts, and governance is also required.

One major conundrum of modern microbiology is the large pangenome (gene pool) present in microbes, which is much larger than those found in complex organisms such as humans. Here, we argue that this diversity of gene pools carried by different strains is maintained largely due to the control exercised by viral predation. Viruses maintain a high strain diversity through time that we describe as constant-diversity equilibrium, preventing the hoarding of resources by specific clones. Thus, viruses facilitate the release and degradation of dissolved organic matter in the ocean, which may lead to better ecosystem functioning by linking top-down to bottom-up control. By maintaining this equilibrium, viruses act as a key element of the adaptation of marine microbes to their environment and likely evolve as a single evolutionary unit.

When President Bill Clinton and Francis Collins, then the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, celebrated the near completion of the human genome sequence at the White House in the summer of 2000, it is unlikely that they or anyone else could have predicted the blossoming of meta-omics in the following two decades and their applications in modern human microbiome and environmental microbiome research. This transformation was enabled by the development of high-throughput sequencing technologies and sophisticated computational biology tools and bioinformatics software packages. Today, environmental meta-omics has undoubtedly revolutionized our understanding of ocean ecosystems, providing the genetic blueprint of oceanic microscopic organisms. In this review, I discuss the importance of functional genomics in future marine microbiome research and advocate a position for a gene-centric, bottom-up approach in modern oceanography. I propose that a synthesis of multidimensional approaches is required for a better understanding of the true functionality of the marine microbiome.

The seasonal sea ice zone encompasses the region between the winter maximum and summer minimum sea ice extent. In both the Arctic and Antarctic, the majority of the ice cover can now be classified as seasonal. Here, we review the sea ice physics that governs the evolution of seasonal sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic, spanning sea ice growth, melt, and dynamics and including interactions with ocean surface waves as well as other coupled processes. The advent of coupled wave-ice modeling and discrete-element modeling, together with improved and expanded satellite observations and field campaigns, has yielded advances in process understanding. Many topics remain in need of further investigation, including rheologies appropriate for seasonal sea ice, wave-induced sea ice fracture, welding for sea ice freeze-up, and the distribution of snow on seasonal sea ice. Future research should aim to redress biases (such as disparities in focus between the Arctic and Antarctic and between summer and winter processes) and connect observations to modeling across spatial scales.

Marine invertebrate mass mortality events (MMEs) threaten biodiversity and have the potential to catastrophically alter ecosystem structure. A proximal question around acute MMEs is their etiologies and/or environmental drivers. Establishing a robust cause of mortality is challenging in marine habitats due to the complexity of the interactions among species and the free dispersal of microorganisms from surrounding waters to metazoan microbiomes. The 2013-2014 sea star wasting disease (SSWD) MME in the northeast Pacific Ocean highlights the difficulty in establishing responsible agents. In less than a year of scientific investigation, investigators identified a candidate agent and provided at the time convincing data of pathogenic and transmissible disease. However, later investigation failed to support the initial results, and critical retrospective analyses of experimental procedures and reinterpretation of early findings disbanded any candidate agent. Despite the circuitous path that the investigation and understanding of SSWD have taken, lessons learned from the initial investigation-improving on approaches that led to misinterpretation-have been successfully applied to the 2022 Diadema antillarum investigation. In this review, we outline the history of the initial SSWD investigation, examine how early exploration led to spurious interpretations, summarize the lessons learned, provide recommendations for future work in other systems, and examine potential links between the SSWD event and the Diadema antillarum MME.

Madagascar's celebrated land-vertebrate assemblage has long been studied and discussed. How the ancestors of the 30 different lineages arrived on the island, which has existed since 85 Mya and is separated from neighboring Africa by 430 km of water, is a deeply important question. Did the colonizations take place when the landmass formed part of Gondwana, or did they occur later and involve either now-drowned causeways or overwater dispersal (on vegetation rafts or by floating/swimming)? Following a historical review, we appraise the geological-geophysical evidence and the faunal-suite colonization record. Twenty-six of the clades are explained by temporally stochastic overwater dispersals, spanning 69-0 Mya, while two others are considered Gondwanan vicariant relicts. Due to a lack of information, the remaining two groups cannot be evaluated. The findings thus appear to resolve a debate that has rumbled along, with sporadic eruptions, since the mid-1800s.

The speciation of most biologically active trace metals in seawater is dominated by complexation by organic ligands. This review traces the history of work in this area, from the early observations that showed surprisingly poor recoveries using metal preconcentration protocols to the present day, where advances in mass spectroscopy and stable isotope geochemistry are providing new insights into the structure, origin, fate, and biogeochemical impact of organic ligands. Many long-standing hypotheses about the specific biological origin of ligands such as siderophores in seawater are finally being validated. This work has revealed the complexity of organic complexation, with multiple ligands and, in some cases, timescales of ligand exchange that are much slower than originally thought. The influence of organic complexation on scavenging is now a key parameter in biogeochemical models of biologically essential metals, especially iron. New insights about the sources and sinks of ligands are required to enhance the usefulness of these models.