At the beginning of September Sarah, Nichole, Ben, Aditya and Alex headed down to the Marine Biological Association (MBA) in Plymouth for the Advances in Coccolithophore Research meeting.
Did you know there’s a direct train from Edinburgh to Plymouth? It only takes 8hrs 43 mins, if you are lucky! But what a great time to finish the conference talk!
The conference brought together researchers from all over the world (Norway, Croatia, North Carolina, Spain to name a few) and being a hybrid conference there was a good share of participants online (Japan, India, Netherlands). The meetings started in lockdown as virtual conferences online in 2021 and 2022 before moving to hybrid in 2023 in Bergen and now growing to 40 in person people in Plymouth.
The MBA was a great place to host the meeting having been researching coccolithophores for over 100 years of their near 150 year history. The keynote was given by Professor Colin Brownlee from the MBA who gave a fascinating talk on coccolithophore calcification mechanisms and transports of ions from seawater into the cell.
Day 1 continued with lots of cell biology and insights into cell process from haptophyte evolution to biomineralization to calcium compartments. Day 2 looked at slight larger scale processes with OceanCANDY PhD student Ben Gustafson giving a talk on Pelagic calcifiers’ diversity and relative contributions to production and export of CaCO3, where he discussed the production and export of coccolithophores alongside foraminifera and pteropods. Day 2’s afternoon session focus was on Climarte Change which kicked off with Professor Ros Rickaby from University of Oxford giving insights into calcification from isotopic measurements and the paleo record. Alex contributed to this session with his talk on Climate Stressor Impacts on Coccolithophores and the Carbonate Pump. During the final day Sarah shared data from the CHALKY project with her talk Coccolithophore physiology and 2024 bloom dynamics in the Iceland Basin.
Of course a conference is not a conference without a poster session, or in this case three poster sessions! Both Nichole and Aditya had posters on display and had lots of interesting discussions across both evenings.
It was a great coccolithophore bootcamp and we are already looking forward to the next on in Croatia in 2027!