A new study featured in Science suggests that coral may be able to recover from disaster.

The paper, co-authored by Richard Aronson of the Florida Institute of Technology, combined the skills of several universities, including Prof. Steven Vollmer and PhD student David Combosch from Northeastern University.

The study focused on the reefs off the Pacific Coast of Panama. Using a 17-foot-long irrigation pipe, researchers were able to reveal the 6,000-year lifespan of a coral reef. After pulling out the sample, the team discovered that the reef had shut down for 2,500 years—40 percent of its existence.

So what caused this reef to virtually die and come back to life? Researchers say the ocean’s water cycle played a large factor. The hot and cold temperatures from frequent La Nina and El Nino events created an environment that made it difficult for the coral to grow. When the extreme fluctuations in water temperature began to dissipate, the coral came back to life.

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There are more than 3,000 species of ter­mites in the world, all living in social colonies with dis­tinct hier­ar­chies. They can be dev­as­tating pests, with the ability to destroy entire build­ings. But they’re also an impor­tant com­po­nent of nat­ural ecosys­tems, with much to teach us about soil nutrient recy­cling. Still, nei­ther of these facts is what gets Rebeca Rosen­gaus, an asso­ciate pro­fessor of biology in the depart­ment of marine and envi­ron­mental sci­ences, out of bed in the morning. As she put it, “I’m inter­ested in them because they’re neat.”

In the vast majority of ter­mite colonies, a single king-queen pair is respon­sible for repro­duc­tion. But in the early 1980s, researchers dis­cov­ered some­thing very odd when they looked inside the mature arbo­real nests of one species, Nasu­titermes corniger: About 20 per­cent of the colonies were headed by what looked like “mini-orgies,” said Rosen­gaus, who has been studying social insects like ter­mites and ants for 30 years.

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Prof. Kimbro, currently stationed at Northeastern University’s Marine Science Center in Nahant, collected synthesized research on marine diversity reports published from 1997-2012 to better understand the specific biological and environmental properties that allow invasive species to succeed or fail.

“For the past 15 years, marine scientists have conducted a lot of experiments that have taught us a lot about specific invasions in many different places. But unlike terrestrial scientists, no one had pieced all of these unique stories together to see if they collectively tell us a general and useful message. And until we see cattle swimming and kudzu growing in the ocean, we can’t just recycle the messages from land studies and use them to manage our coastal systems.”

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People tend to be skep­tical of envi­ron­mental sci­ence and polit­ical sci­ence com­bined major Anderson Page’s house, a 144-​​square-​​foot unit built this spring as part of his senior thesis project.

“There’s a look in people’s eyes and a kind of smirk, because the whole thing almost sounds like a joke—a tiny house on a trailer,” Page said. “But while it’s small and looks almost like a gin­ger­bread house from the out­side, it’s really nice and even roomy on the inside.”

Anderson Page built a 144-​​square-​​foot house as part of his senior thesis project.

Page, who is 6 feet 3 inches tall, designed the house to be as spa­cious and effi­cient as pos­sible, putting careful thought into every detail of the design. The 11-​​foot ceil­ings keep the building from feeling cramped; at a house­warming party, eight friends fit com­fort­ably inside.

“You can live in small spaces,” Page said, “but if they’re not designed well, it’s going to feel cramped, uncom­fort­able, and inefficient.”

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Northeastern University has continued to be at the front line of global leadership by providing students with international experiential learning experience. Over the past five years students have been supporting this theme by traveling to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Since the University received observer status in 2007, students have been able to take advantage of representing the University at the annual Conference of the Parties. This year, the COP was attended by three students including the Marine and Environmental Sciences Department’s Michael Green.

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