Tag: Guy Harvey Research Institute

NSU Director Made University Her Home During Its Infancy

Melissa Dore, the director of academic support and administration for the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences

Before Nova Southeastern University became Nova Southeastern University, Melissa Dore was here.

Dore was raised in rural Maine, far from the glitz of South Florida and its enticing beaches and balmy temperatures. She was drawn to the small South Florida school formerly called Nova University because of her love for marine studies. It was January 1992. Nova U. had the only master’s program in coastal zone management she could find.

Without realizing it, Dore found herself catching the wave of three decades of historic growth on the once fledgling campus. In 1994, Nova University merged with Southeastern University of Health Sciences, which added colleges of Pharmacy, Optometry, Allied Health, Medical Sciences and Dental Medicine, to form Nova Southeastern University.

For Dore, it was the right place at the right time.

After receiving her master’s degree in Marine Biology/Coastal Zone Management, Dore was hired in 1997 as an administrative assistant at the Oceanographic Center. She now is the director of academic support and administration for the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences.

“Since I have been here, NSU has provided me opportunities I wouldn’t have been able to get in the Northeast,” she said. “In my current role, I am the liaison among student services, students, faculty and administration for the college. I collaborate with others in the dean’s office to streamline processes to benefit the students and to uphold academic integrity.”

Dore’s first studied ostracods – minute aquatic crustaceans – in the marine environment. She worked with scanning electron microscopy to determine the environmental history of a place by using the ostracods as environmental indicators.

“Throughout my time at NSU, the most exhilarating research I participated in was working with the Broward County Sea Turtle Project back in the early 1990s,” she said. “Seeing what hard work we did then continue to grow and come to fruition now is amazing.”

Dore has used her extensive educational background to amplify her impact at NSU.

With her doctorate in higher education leadership, Dore helped develop retention plans at the undergraduate and graduate levels at NSU. Using her M.S. in College Student Affairs, she has explored how to help students enter the university. Her M.S.in Law, which she’ll complete this summer, has enabled her to research artificial intelligence in higher education and its legal ramifications.

“My current work is building resilience in students, staff, faculty and administrators in higher education,” she said. “I am the educational chair of the Academic Resilience Consortium and I have been developing and running a monthly webinar series focusing on how to create mental, emotional and social resilience in all stakeholders in higher education.”

Dore grew up surrounded by great aunts, uncles and grandparents who loved nature and showed her lakes, ponds, streams, bogs and glacial moraines in the Highlands of Maine. There, she learned how to identify animal tracks, birds and animal calls.

“I grew up swimming, boating and mucking around in these glacial waters,” she said.

Among Dore’s most influential role models were Dr. Lynn Margulis, an evolutionary biologist and huge proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution, and physicist and oceanographer Allyn Vine, a leader in the development of submersibles to explore the deep sea.

Education has been Dore’s foundation throughout her life, and her positive experiences in that realm at NSU have kept her here.

“One of the driving forces in higher education for me has been the ability to continue to expand my knowledge and work in a collaborative atmosphere,” she said. “Also, the fact I was allowed to see areas of concern and had the ability to develop solutions for the benefit of the students.”

When Dore is not researching or working with students, faculty and staff, she sings and volunteers. She has been singing with the Nova Singers since 1995. This year marks the 48th concert season of the Nova Singers, NSU’s community chorus made up of 140 members — from undergraduate students to older residents. When the 14th Dalai Lama made a historic visit to campus in 2004, Dore was among the singers at the ceremony at the Alvin Sherman Library, where the religious leader honored the university with a “prayer wheel” and received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from NSU.

“We have traveled to Europe, sung in the Vatican and Carnegie Hall, too,” she said. “I also volunteer for the Little Free Libraries in Fort Lauderdale. We stock all the small free libraries around the neighborhoods so everyone has a book to read.”

Professor’s Co-Authored Paper Promotes Marine Biodiversity Strategy

A fundamental challenge to marine biodiversity protection is the relatively poor and patchy understanding of the diversity and distribution of marine life, making it more difficult to strategically designate protective measures and assess their success.

The marine environment presents unique challenges: the world ocean is vast, much of it is distant from human populations, its life is often hidden from view and sampling presents formidable logistical difficulties. As a result, observations of ocean life are a fraction of those on land and are especially sparse in the water column and deep sea. These ecosystems have been the subject of an internationally recognized program led by researchers at Halmos College of Arts and Sciences and the Guy Harvey Oceanographic Research Center (HCAS).

The program, titled “DEEPEND” (www.deependconsortium.org), is led by Professor Tracey Sutton, who was among 28 scientists, economists and marine policy experts worldwide who were invited to assess the U.S. national strategy for marine biodiversity protection. Sutton participated in a series of dialogues and workshops over the past three years, the results of which were recently published.

In this paper, published in One Earth, the task force that included Sutton proposed a scientific framework to assess the distribution and abundance of marine biodiversity in U.S. waters inside and outside existing protections and  applied it to waters from the near coast to the borders of the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (200 miles offshore).

Why This Matters

Marine biodiversity globally is in crisis. Climate change, overfishing, habitat destruction and other extractive industries are causing species losses at an alarming rate. Increasingly, scientists, managers and governments are taking steps to protect marine life. But it requires a network of protected areas that are ecologically representative, foster connectivity between habitats and consider the dynamic nature of coastal and marine habitats.

The framework is the basis by which managers and communities can ground regional and local actions with knowledge of marine biodiversity distribution. It’s crucial to fulfilling the president’s commitment to protect 30% of land and waters by 2030, implementing the White House Ocean Climate Action and National Ocean Biodiversity Strategy. It can inform existing mandates that involve area-based management, from the National Marine Sanctuaries Act to the Marine Mammal Protection and the Endangered Species Act.

Posted 02/04/24

Local Shark Attack Victim’s Story Inspires NSU to Action

Earlier this year while getting ready for work, Nova Southeastern University’s (NSU) media relations/public information officer Joe Donzelli had NBC’s Today Show on in the background when something caught his attention.

It was the story about Ella Reed, a Florida teenager who had been bitten by a shark while wading in the surf near her home.

“Working at NSU all these years, my ears prick up when I hear someone talking about sharks,” Donzelli said. “When I focused in on the story, I said to myself, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta get her to come shark tagging with our research scientists. That can’t be the only encounter she has with a shark.’”

Donzelli was impressed with her poise and courage – not everyone would be so blasé having been bitten by a shark. And something else in the story caught his attention.

“I heard that Ella was interested in being a marine biologist, and given NSU’s preeminence in the field, I knew this was a perfect match,” he said.

So, when he got to work, Donzelli reached out to the reporter who did the story for the Today Show. Almost immediately the reporter was intrigued and said he would reach out to the family to see if they were interested, after all, he already had a relationship with them. And, sure enough, they jumped at the chance.

“When I got the invitation to go shark tagging, I was super excited,” Ella said.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and researchers from NSU’s Guy Harvey Research Institute (GHRI) welcomed a crew from NBC’s The Today Show, along with Ella, her friend Kloe (who was with Ella and helped her when she was bitten), her brother and parents, who joined Mahmood Shivji, Ph.D., director of NSU’s GHRI and the Save our Seas Foundation Shark Research Center, and Derek Burkholder, Ph.D., an NSU research scientist and their crew for a day on the Atlantic Ocean to catch, tag, and release sharks off the Florida Coast.

You can see The Today Show story HERE

“Understanding sharks is vitally important for restoring and maintaining the overall health of our oceans,” Shivji said. “As high-level and apex predators, they play a major part in balancing the marine ecosystem, and if there are no sharks, the oceans and by extension, the Earth, will suffer.”

Shivji said that some estimates show that annually 100 million sharks are removed from the oceans.

“Clearly that is not a sustainable number, and many shark species have declined by 70-90 percent,” he said. “By learning as much about sharks as we can, that information can be used by ocean management authorities to properly conserve sharks for generations to come.”

When the day finally came to head out on the ocean, Donzelli said that the one thing everyone was nervous about was would they be able to catch a shark during the trip. He had been on trips in the past where they spent the entire day on the water and didn’t catch a thing.

“There’s an old saying – it’s called fishing, not catching,” he said with a laugh.

But nothing was going to dampen this day for Ella – after pulling up a few empty bait lines, bingo, they had a shark. And not just any shark, a nine and a half foot long, 500+ pound female tiger shark.

And true to form, Ella, fearless as ever, jumped right in and worked side by side with our marine biologists to gather tissue samples from the shark and even put the tag on its dorsal fin.

The group managed to catch two additional sharks – nurse sharks – during the trip, and each time Ella and her group was right there working with NSU researchers, enjoying every minute. In fact, with one of the nurse sharks, Ella, fearless as ever, jumped in the water and got up close and personal with the large fish.

When the group returned to shore, there was one more surprise for Ella and her family.

“We talked with our admissions folks, and they agreed that we needed to nurture her love of the ocean and marine biology,” Donzelli said. “So, we are reserving a spot for Ella when she graduates from high school and will work to provide her with as many scholarship opportunities as we can. We’d be lucky to have her become an NSU Shark.”

Posted 06/18/23

Student Studies Harmful Algal Blooms in Lake Okeechobee

Paisley Samuel

Lake Okeechobee (or Lake O) can be considered “Florida’s Inland Sea,”, as it is  the largest lake in the southeastern United States and is located at the center of Florida’s Everglades ecosystem. Before heavy development in the 19th century, Lake O provided freshwater to the Everglades ecosystem to its south. Now the lake has been permanently altered by a series of major drainage projects which allow canals to drain the water to sustain large South Florida urban communities and agriculture.

Unfortunately, because of the increasing development, nutrient pollution and degrading water quality, cyanobacterial based harmful algal blooms (or cyanoHABs) have now become a common occurrence in Lake Okeechobee. In recent decades, these bloom events have increased in both abundance and prevalence.  However, unequivocal causes for the blooms have not yet been identified.

Four years ago, the molecular microbiology and genomics (MMG) laboratory at the Guy Harvey Oceanographic Center (GHOC) and the Department of Biological Sciences (DoBS) in Halmos College of Arts and Sciences and Guy Harvey Oceanographic Research Center (HCAS)  was commissioned to investigate the microbial community structure of HABs through a grant from the Army Corp of Engineers, Aquatic Nuisance Species Research Program (ANSRP). Working with the colleagues at the Florida Gulf Coast and the US Geological Society, the MMG has now generated millions of DNA sequence reads of the freshwater bacterial communities from 19 sites around Lake O.

“The samples were taken during active blooms and also more quiescent periods for comparison over the last three years,” says Paisley Samuel, a marine science master’s student.

She will soon graduate from Halmos and the MMG laboratory, as well present a portion of her thesis research in a talk titled  “Effects of Cyanobacteria Harmful Algal Blooms on the Microbial Community within Lake Okeechobee, FL” to a professional audience at this year’s Greater Everglades Ecosystem Restoration (GEER) meeting in Coral Springs (https://conference.ifas.ufl.edu/geer/).  Her attendance at the meeting was generously sponsored by the South Florida and Caribbean Cooperative Ecosystems Studies Unit (SFC CESU) which “was established in 2000 under the leadership of the Department of the Interior and has led to the partnership of nine federal agencies and 21 academic institutions and non-government organizations.”

“Ms. Samuel has done a masterful job at generating the data in the laboratory and then carefully learning various computational methods to analyze the large volumes of digital sequence data. This has now produced a coherent and interesting story about microbial community dynamics that could affect cyanoHABs on the lake”, says Dr. Jose (Joe) Lopez, a professor and director the MMG Laboratory.

Posted 04/23/23

Lab Finds Differences between Port and Reef Sediments

Port Everglades

Marine ports can be very busy places. From the vantage point of NSU’s Guy Harvey Oceanographic Research Center (GHOC), one can easily observe and be part of the boat traffic going in and out of Port Everglades Inlet (PEI). This includes small and large recreational vehicles, Coast Guard patrols, sleek and modern looking yachts, huge tankers, and cargo vessels, loaded with oil or other commodities, and of course cruise ships ferrying passengers to good times in the Caribbean.

All this activity contributes to PEI being one of the busiest ports in the SE United States, which started almost a century ago in 1928.  The human activities also set the port physically apart from nearby natural habitats, which our laboratory has corroborated by profiling the marine sediments from both port and nearby coral reef sites. Molecular microbiology analyses provide some stark contrasts.   “Although most of the sites are within a few kilometers from each other, and are connected by daily tidal flows, the port and reef microbial communities showed distinct characteristics which were statistically significant.”, says Jose (Joe) Lopez, Ph.D., a professor with a laboratory at the GHOC and the Department of Biological Sciences in Halmos College of Arts and Sciences and Guy Harvey Oceanographic Research Center (HCAS).

The study was analyzed and co-written by Lopez and affiliate NSU faculty, Lauren Krausfeldt, Ph.D., and published in the open access online journal PeerJ.  With the help of dedicated NSU students, like Catherine Bilodeau and Hyo Lee, and project initiation by former FL Dept of Environmental Protection manager, Shelby Casali, molecular microbiological methods, now routine in the field, were applied to uncover the details of which microbes live in nearshore or port sediments.  The universal gene used to identify bacteria, is called 16S rRNA, which has been previously used to characterize other samples ranging widely from shark and human teeth, octopus skin, sponge and anglerfish tissue in the GHOC molecular microbiology laboratory run by Lopez.

In the Port Everglades study, NSU researchers found that some photosynthetic cyanobacterial group abundances decreased in the reef sediments in 2021, which could indicate changing irradiance reaching sensitive corals and other symbiotic hosts that depend on sunlight.

The new PeerJ study on marine sediments has potential ramifications on local coral reef health, because routine dredging and other human activities can stir up port sediments that ultimately disperse and settle on nearby coral reef habitats.  This data, along with previous microbial research in the Lopez laboratory describing water quality provides useful baselines that can be used by local environmental managers.

Posted 04/23/23

NSU Billfish Researchers Use First-of-Its-Kind Tracking Sensors

Courtesy NSU Guy Harvey Research Institute

FORT LAUDERDALE/DAVIE, Fla. – Blue marlin, which is one of the largest fish, and sailfish, which is one of the fastest fish, provide some of the most prized fights in the sportfishing world, making catching them with rod and reel one of those “once in a lifetime” experiences. Their distinctive elongated front-end bill gives them a built-in sword-like weapon for hunting, and thus the moniker “billfish.”

These high-performance fish are found in warm waters around the world, and because of their high-speed runs, strong fights, and aerial acrobatics when hooked, they are some of the most sought-after fish in offshore angling. They form the basis of multimillion-dollar, international sportfishing industries which continue to grow. Furthermore, these billfishes are also incidentally caught in large numbers in commercial fishing operations around the world.

Courtesy NSU Guy Harvey Research Institute

With concerns about overfishing of these majestic animals, especially blue marlin, efforts to try and prevent population declines have prompted mandated “catch and release” rules in the recreational fishing industry in many regions. And for the most part, after an angler catches and releases one of these sport fish after what can be a very long and strenuous fight, the thought is “well, the fish will be okay,” and the fishermen go about the rest of their day. What wasn’t known is what happens to the fish after you release them – do they survive, and if so, how long does it take them to recover.

Thanks to researchers at Nova Southeastern University’s (NSU) Guy Harvey Research Institute (GHRI), who designed novel electronic tag packages incorporating high-tech sensors, we now have, for the first time, a detailed view of exactly how these fish behave once they slip back below the surface and out of sight.

“For the angler, a billfish fight consists of a fast-paced, high-energy battle of wills that hopefully culminates with a fishing-line leader grab and a safe release of the fish, some high fives, rehydration, and re-setting the spread for the next one,” said Ryan Logan, a doctoral candidate and research associate at NSU’s GHRI. “For the fish, on the other hand, this is a fight for its life using a tremendous amount of energy, and it was those high-speed runs and aerial acrobatics that made me wonder: How long does it take them to physically recover from that fight after being released?”

Courtesy NSU Guy Harvey Research Institute

Using a high-resolution technology that had never before been applied to billfish, a new research study just published in ICES Journal of Marine Science set out to answer the question of post-release behavior and recovery time for blue marlin and sailfish caught offshore of one of the premier fishing locations in the world, Tropic Star Lodge, in southwest Panama.

“We used an inertial measurement unit (IMU), which integrates multiple sensors including multi-axes accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers to provide estimation of an object’s orientation and movement in space,” Logan said. “Sounds very technical, but most people are likely to have one of these units in their pocket or on their wrist right now. They are used in nearly all modern electronics for a variety of purposes, such as telling your cell phone screen to rotate when you turn the device sideways, or how your watch counts how many steps you take and how many calories you burn throughout the day.”

This research is part of an ongoing partnership between NSU, the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation, and Tropic Star Lodge in Panama. Learn more ONLINE (etps.ghriresearch.org).

Logan said that what they found was both amazing and, at the same time, common sense.

In general, sailfish, which are smaller in size and tend to put up shorter fights when hooked, took less time to recover than blue marlin, which can fight the angler for hours. Additionally, the sensors showed that both blue marlin and sailfish swim much harder and faster right after being released from the stress of the fight, compared to after they have recovered – because they must swim to breathe. Basically, the fish have to “catch their breath” by actually swimming harder to get enough water flowing over their gills to extract more oxygen. It’s quite opposite to what humans do after we exert ourselves on a treadmill or elliptical – we slow down to catch our breath until we’re ready to go again.

Logan said it is important to understand the stresses that being caught and released can put on these high-performance fish, especially given where and when it may be caught.

“It’s possible that if a lot of marlin are caught on a spawning aggregation but then don’t spawn after being released due to stress, for example, that could greatly reduce the reproductive output of that population” he said. “And that is not a good thing for species of conservation concern.”

Logan explained that having information on what the fish do after release, what temperatures and oxygen levels they need to recover, and accurate information on their recovery dynamics, may help in predicting how many fish will not survive after being caught, based on the environmental conditions of where they are caught. In other words, understanding how fish behave and how long it takes to recover after release adds an important component to the management and conservation of billfish fisheries around the world.

While this research took place off Panama, sport fishing is a huge business in Florida, where NSU’s GHRI is located. There’s a direct economic impact to this study: recent numbers show that fishing is an $11.5 billion dollar industry in Florida, supporting approximately 100,000 jobs. Getting as much scientific information as possible to help conserve sport fish populations is vital not only for the health of the oceans, but also for keeping sport fishing and its associated economy thriving.

That’s why the research being done by scientists at NSU’s GHRI involving billfish is so important; the more we learn, the more we know, the more information we have to help us protect the health of these sport fish for many years to come.

Posted 08/15/22

Students design social media campaign for Guy Harvey Research Institute

During the Winter 2021 semester, undergraduate Communication students in COMM 4300: Social Media Theory and Practice had the opportunity to put their social skills into action and design a strategic social media campaign for NSU’s Guy Harvey Research Institute. Each winter, the course, offered through the Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts in the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences, partners with a real-world client seeking to solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity with its social media presence.

“The best way for students to learn how to conduct a bona fide social media campaign is by partnering with a real client with a real need, and we were excited to have the chance to work with Dr. Shivji and the Guy Harvey Research Institute,” said Whitney Lehmann, associate professor of communication for the Department of Communication, Media, the Arts. “Dr. Shivji had a very clear, strategic vision for the GHRI’s social presence, and it was an invaluable learning experience for students to work with him and his team to design a unique and effective campaign tied to their organizational goals.”

Students kicked off the semester by conducting an initial client interview with Mahmood Shivji, Ph.D., professor for the Department of Biological Sciences and director of the Guy Harvey Research Institute and Save Our Seas Foundation Shark Research Center. Following the interview with Shivji and Tyler Plum, the GHRI’s social media manager and a master’s student in the Department of Biological Sciences, the undergraduate students conducted an audit of the GHRI’s social media presence and presented Shivji and Plum with proposed objectives, strategies and tactics tied to priority audiences and organizational goals. Campaign deliverables included new social media branding, a social media manual, targeted Twitter lists for networking with members of the media, and a revamped YouTube channel for archiving and curating GHRI video content.

“Working with Dr. Lehmann and her students was not only tremendously informative for us in terms of learning better strategies for social media platform construction and use, but it was also a pleasure interacting with the impressively creative undergraduates,” Shivji said. “The end result of this campaign is a vastly better social media platform for the GHRI to disseminate our work.”

For more information about the B.A. in Communication program, COMM 4300: Social Media Theory and Practice and other courses offered through the curriculum’s Strategic Communication concentration and minor, click here.

Follow the Guy Harvey Research Institute on social media @nsughri, the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences @nsuhcas, and the Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts @nsu_dcma

Guy Harvey Research Institute Celebrates 20 Years

Halmos Faculty Member Mahmood Shivji, Ph.D. and Guy Harvey, Ph.D.

During November, the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation (GHOF) celebrated the 20th anniversary of the NSU Guy Harvey Research Institute (GHRI). Housed in the Halmos College of Natural Science and Oceanography, GHRI specializes in pelagic fish conservation, or large open-ocean fish such as sharks, marlin and tuna. Their recent work focuses on satellite tagging and tracking, as well as genetic research, among other topics. They also led a team that has successfully decoded the White Shark genome, which could potentially have applications for human health research due to their low incidences of cancer and rapid wound healing.

“The work that’s being done at the GHRI is very cutting-edge, very high-level scientific research that’s had some tremendous results for the conservation of our oceans and the big animals that live there,” said Greg Jacoski, executive director of the GHOF. “I know there’s a lot of great research that the university turns out as a whole, but I think the work that is being done out of the Oceanographic Center and the Guy Harvey Research Institute specifically is some of the best going on in the world right now, and [NSU] should be proud of the work that’s being done there.”

Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation to Honor Dr. George L. Hanbury II During Banquet GHOF to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Guy Harvey Research Institute

The Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation (GHOF) will honor Nova Southeastern University’s (NSU) President and CEO Dr. George L. Hanbury II and celebrate the 20th anniversary of the NSU Guy Harvey Research Institute (GHRI) during its annual ocean conservation fundraising dinner on Saturday, November 2 from 6 to 10 p.m. at the Fort Lauderdale Marriott Harbor Beach Resort & Spa in Fort Lauderdale.

“This year is particularly special, as we honor both Dr. Hanbury and the incredible scientists and groundbreaking research at GHRI,” said world-renowned artist, scientist, conservationist and entrepreneur Dr. Guy Harvey. “We are on a transformational journey together to protect our ocean ecosystem and conserve our marine environment.”

Tickets to the 11th Annual Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation (GHOF) Banquet are $300 per person and $2,500 for a table of 10. Guests will enjoy dinner, open bar, live musical entertainment, a video retrospective of the exciting ocean expeditions and research findings from 2019 and a live and silent auction with original Guy Harvey artwork, exciting trips and unique gifts.

The annual banquet benefits the GHOF which conducts scientific research and hosts educational programs aimed at conserving the marine environment. The GHOF also funds affiliated researchers working to better understand our ocean ecosystem and educators helping to foster the next era of marine conservationists.

For tickets, visit www.guyharvey.com/2019-ghof-banquet-and-fundraiser.html. For more information and sponsorship opportunities, visit www.GuyHarvey.com or e-mail GHOF@GuyHarvey.com.

NSU’s Guy Harvey Research Institute to Study Whale Shark Migrations

NSU’s Guy Harvey Research Institute (GHRI) and the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation partner with the popular ocean plastics clean-up company, 4Ocean, to study the migrations of the majestic whale shark, the world’s largest fish. 4Ocean and the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation have donated funds toward this research. The whale shark is a filter feeder that has swum the planet’s warm oceans for millions of years, and according to GHRI research this species can live for at least 130 years. But the whale shark is now endangered and in need of better scientific understanding for improving its conservation.

Established in 1999, GHRI is a collaboration between the renowned marine artist, scientist and explorer, Dr. Guy Harvey, and Nova Southeastern University’s Halmos College of Natural Sciences and Oceanography. The mission of the GHRI is to provide the scientific information necessary to understand, conserve, and effectively manage the world’s marine fishes and their ecosystems.

For more information:https://4ocean.com/whale-shark-cause?fbclid=IwAR1qVLSGgnXvoCka9kFkkFjA-bmBIaLmJMCQPBGYznSpcJ6P8A0Tt0dTaZU