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New Laser Technique May Help Detect Chemical Warfare in Atmosphere

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The Department of Homeland Security could benefit from a reliable, real-time instrument that could scan the atmosphere for toxic agents in order to alert communities to a biological or chemical attack. UCF optics and photonics Professor Konstantin Vodopyanov is developing just such a technology to accomplish that.

He has found a new way to use infrared lasers to detect even trace amounts of chemicals in the air. Every chemical is made up of individual molecules that vibrate at their own unique frequency. Vodopyanov has found a way to use lasers to detect these vibrations.

The technique is so accurate and sensitive that he can determine if there is a molecule of any chemical present even at concentrations as low as one part per billion. So even if someone tried to hide the toxic chemicals, his technique would be able to detect them.

His findings are published today in Nature Photonics.

“We still have much work ahead,” he said. “We are now working on broadening the range of the laser frequencies that can get the job done. If costs can be reduced and the tech made mobile, the applications could be endless.”

A similar principle is used in the medical field to detect biomarkers for different kinds of health conditions, including cancer, by taking breath samples.

It’s possible, Vodopyanov said, because of the rules of physics.

“The frequencies of molecules are very distinct, but they are invariant – here, on a different continent, on a different planet, anywhere,” Vodopyanov said. “It is universal. Think of it as a molecular fingerprint. So when we use the laser we can detect these fingerprints with great precision.”

The novel approach could open the door for developing non-invasive technology, including sensors, that could be used to detect:

  • airborne agents that could be encountered in a biological or chemical attack at home or on the battlefield
  • traces of life by space explorers on missions to other planets or asteroids

Other collaborators on the Nature Photonics paper include Andrey Muraviev at UCF’s the College of Optics & Photonics, Viktor Smolski of IPG Photonics -– Mid-Infrared Lasers in Birmingham, AL, and Zachary Loparo from UCF’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

Vodopyanov obtained his doctorate from the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow. He’s spent years teaching and conducting research in Russia, Germany, the United Kingdom and Stanford University in California before joining UCF in 2013. He’s also worked in industry, including the Silicon Valley start-up Picarro, which was developing a laser-based breath analyzer for early detection of ulcers. He’s written more than 300 papers and is funded by various organizations including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Office of Naval Research, Air Force and NASA.

Fish “Super Power” May Offer Clues About Biodiversity Evolution

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A group of international scientists, including a University of Central Florida biologist, recently discovered that a species of fish living in the north Atlantic Ocean has an ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions that are linked to the depth of its watery habitat.

The unknown mechanism, which gives the roundnose grenadier its “super power,” appears to be coded into the species’ genetics.

Findings of the team’s study are published this week in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. The work was conducted at Durham University in the United Kingdom in collaboration with a team of scientists and students from UCF, the University of Liverpool and Marine Scotland.

Often when people think of the ocean they think only of species living near the surface such as corals and reef fishes. Part of what makes this species so interesting to researchers is its vast vertical habitat, which can range from 590 to 8,500 feet (180 to 2,600 meters) below the surface.

“The ocean environment varies greatly between 200 and 2,600 meters including available food and light and water temperature,” said UCF Biologist Michelle Gaither. “What is really cool about this project is that we were able to use a new genetic tool to look at the differences between populations over just 1,000 meters of depth.”

Figuring out how fish evolve and adapt, especially in such vast environments, is important to understanding biodiversity and is important to conservation efforts.

In order to conserve species, scientists must understand how biodiversity originates and where we are most likely to find novel species and genotypes. Studying the genomes of this fish is just the beginning to unlocking the mystery of how biodiversity is arranged in the ocean.

“If you’re going to regulate a fishery, you can’t just say OK – let’s regulate it. Scientists need to consider where the species they’re trying to protect lives,” Gaither said. “For this species, you can’t just say no fishing below 1,200 meters because now we know that genetic diversity differs across the whole vertical range and you have to protect the whole slope.”

Once the team decoded the genome for the roundnose grenadier, they found that fish carried different genotypes depending upon at what depth they lived. For example, fish that lived at 1,800 meters were fixed for certain genes while those living closer to the surface had mixed genotypes, but they are all the same species.

“We can roughly predict the fish’s genotype based on where it lives, but the functions of these genes don’t tell the full story yet, it just shows us that there are some specializations involved at living in deeper depths,” Gaither said. “The individuals with those genes succeed living deeper in the ocean while other individuals with different genotypes do not.”

The researchers also know the fish don’t exclusively mate with individuals of their own genotype and when they do mate, it’s very likely they gather into groups called spawning aggregations where they release sperm and eggs into the water column. The fertilized eggs, and later the larvae, float around on the ocean currents for several weeks before all settling onto the ocean bottom. This furthers the mystery of how fish seek out and live at their perspective depths.

“All the fish larvae settle out around 1,200 meters, regardless of genotype and somehow they sort out by depth as they grow and mature,” Gaither said.

As it stands now, this fish is only one species, but if conditions change, it could evolve into more. That’s where Gaither’s appointment in UCF’s Genomics and Bioinformatics Cluster is key. Her work with computer scientists is tapping into new scientific territory to better understand evolution.

“As biologists, this type of research helps us understand how biodiversity evolves and how it’s generated,” Gaither said. “Genomics has given us the tools to begin to truly understand how evolution works and to better protect life on Planet Earth.”

Gaither came to UCF in December 2017 from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and holds a Ph.D. in Zoology.

UCF Hydrogen Fuel Expert Selected for International Award

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A UCF Florida Solar Energy Center scientist with 40 years of experience in research and innovation in the field of hydrogen energy has been selected to receive an international award named after the visionary futuristic writer Jules Verne.  [Read more…] about UCF Hydrogen Fuel Expert Selected for International Award

UCF Seeks New Way to Mine Moon for Water

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UCF’s Phil Metzger and Juliet Brisset from the Florida Space Institute recently landed a contract to develop a model to mine the moon for water.

Data suggests the moon has water locked away in its icy soil, especially at the moon’s poles. The challenge is finding an effective and inexpensive way to get it.

Water is important because its chemical composition could be split into hydrogen and oxygen, which could then be made into rocket fuel. The ability to generate rocket fuel in space could open up more launch possibilities and reduce costs for transportation throughout lunar space and beyond.

Metzger and Brisset aim to come up with a viable method to extract the water. The idea would be to drill holes deep into the moon and pump heat through the holes to warm the regolith underground, which has water locked in frigid ice chunks. As the regolith warms up, the water would be released as vapor and collected through pipes in the hole.

Others have proposed having big equipment dig for the water and drag ice chunks to processing plants on the moon. But the proposed process may require equipment that has less mass and be more reliable than the wheeled digging equipment needed dig up piles of regolith and haul it to processing plants that would extract the water. By extracting the water in-place in the ground, there would be no need to move tons of soil around, Metzger said.

“When you talk about getting things into space, weight matters,” he said. “So we are looking at a technique that would require less stuff you have to transport which still gets the job done.”

Mining the moon is a focus of many researchers around the nation. But most are investigating techniques that collect and process the regolith of the moon rather than the ice. The regolith is the unconsolidated residual material that overlies the solid rock.

The United Launch Alliance (ULA) has contracted the UCF duo to find out if their proposed method is realistic and cost effective.

“Procuring propellant derived from the Moon may be substantially less expensive than hauling the propellant out of Earth’s deep gravity well,” said Bernard Kutter, ULA’s chief scientist. “This in turn could reduce the cost of space transportation by as much as a factor of five.”

Those who can figure out a way to tap into water in space may be in a position to mine it and sell it for a variety of uses from life support systems and rocket fuel to radiation shielding and drinking water for space explorers.

Metzger, a planetary physicist who worked at Kennedy Space Center where he co-founded KSC Swampworks before joining UCF, is leading the project. Brisset, a research associate at the institute who has multiple degrees in mechanical and space engineering as well as physics, will work on the algorithms to run the computer simulations they hope will lead to a viable model. They also plan to hire a student to help with the testing.

The biggest challenge is a matter of geometry, Brisset said.

The team already has data that indicates heating the moon’s underground is possible. But converting the lunar ice into vapor requires high temperatures and unfortunately most of the heat will travel away through the lunar soil and be wasted.

“We have to figure out the right geometric configuration of the holes to increase the area that is heated,” Brisset said. “If we do it right, we should be able to increase the area and the time it stays warm. We will be doing a lot of modeling.”

Study Finds Bacteria in Milk Linked to Rheumatoid Arthritis

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A strain of bacteria commonly found in milk and beef may be a trigger for developing rheumatoid arthritis in people who are genetically at risk, according to a new study from the University of Central Florida.
A team of UCF College of Medicine researchers has discovered a link between rheumatoid arthritis and Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis, known as MAP, a bacteria found in about half the cows in the United States. The bacteria can be spread to humans through the consumption of infected milk, beef and produce fertilized by cow manure.
The UCF researchers are the first to report this connection between MAP and rheumatoid arthritis in a study published in the Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology journal this week. The study, funded in part by a $500,000 grant from the Florida Legislative, was a collaboration between Saleh Naser, UCF infectious disease specialist, Dr. Shazia Bég, rheumatologist at UCF’s physician practice, and Robert Sharp, a biomedical sciences doctoral candidate at the medical school.
Naser had previously discovered a connection between MAP and Crohn’s disease and is involved in the first ever phase III-FDA approved clinical trial to treat Crohn’s patients with antibiotics. Crohn’s and rheumatoid arthritis share the same genetic predispositions and both are often treated using the same types of immunosuppressive drugs.  Those similarities led the team to investigate whether MAP could also be linked to rheumatoid arthritis.
“Here you have two inflammatory diseases, one affects the intestine and the other affects the joints, and both share the same genetic defect and treated with the same drugs. Do they have a common trigger? That was the question we raised and set out to investigate,” Naser said.
For the study, Bég recruited 100 of her patients who volunteered clinical samples for testing.  Seventy-eight percent of the patients with rheumatoid arthritis were found to have a mutation in the PTPN2/22 gene, the same genetic mutation found in Crohn’s patients, and 40 percent of that number tested positive for MAP.
“We believe that individuals born with this genetic mutation and who are later exposed to MAP through consuming contaminated milk or meat from infected cattle are at a higher risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis,” Naser said.
About 1.3 million adults in the U.S. have rheumatoid arthritis – an autoimmune and inflammatory disease that causes the immune system to attack a person’s joints, muscles, bones and organs. Patients suffer from pain and deformities mostly in the hands and feet. It can occur at any age but the most common onset is between 40 and 60 years old and is three times more prevalent in women.
Although case studies have reported that some RA patients suffer from Crohn’s disease and vice versa, the researchers say a national study needs to investigate the incidence of the two diseases in the same patients.
“We don’t know the cause of rheumatoid arthritis, so we’re excited that we have found this association,” Bég said. “But there is still a long way to go.  We need to find out why MAP is more predominant in these patients – whether it’s present because they have RA, or whether it caused RA in these patients. If we find that out, then we can target treatment toward the MAP bacteria.”
The team is conducting further studies to confirm findings and plan to study patients from different geographical and ethnic backgrounds.
“Understanding the role of MAP in rheumatoid arthritis means the disease could be treated more effectively,” Naser said.  “Ultimately, we may be able to administer a combined treatment to target both inflammation and bacterial infection.”
Naser holds a Ph.D in Medical Microbiology from New Mexico State University. He joined UCF in 1995. He has been investigating Crohn’s disease and other auto-immune diseases for more than 30 years. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and has presented his work at numerous conferences.  He has several patents including a licensed DNA technology for detecting MAP.
Bég, a board-certified rheumatologist, has been with UCF since 2011 after completing her fellowship in rheumatology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. In addition to practicing medicine at UCF Health, she is a full-time faculty member at the college. Her research and clinical interests include conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, lupus and osteoporosis.

UCF Launches National Center to Find Big-Picture Solutions to Coastal Threats

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UCF has launched a national research center focused on finding big-picture solutions to threats facing coastal communities.
In 2017, federal and local governments in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico spent more than $284 billion to deal with the impact of hurricanes and flooding, according to NOAA.
“There’s a perfect storm coming,” said Graham Worthy, UCF biologist and director of the National Center for Integrated Coastal Research. “We’ve already seen some of it. With economic constraints, environmental threats and extreme weather events becoming more and more common, now is the time to look at how we develop resilient communities that aren’t constantly in expensive recovery mode.”
While many institutions are studying ways to help coastal communities, UCF’s center is unique by bringing together dozens of experts including biologists, economics, medical care professionals, social scientists, engineers and emergency management personnel to come up with long-term solutions that incorporate multiple disciplines.
“As a biologist, I may find a solution to a water quality issue,” Worthy said. “But I don’t know the economic impact, or whether my solution may create another issue for emergency management or maybe there’s a social impact I haven’t even thought of. By having experts in all these areas together we will begin speaking the same language and come up with solutions that are big picture, and that’s the kind of solutions we need as a society.”
And while some may argue that people who live on the coast know the risks, the threats impact residents living hundreds and even thousands of miles away.
In Florida, much of the economy relies on tourism with people going to the beaches and theme parks. But sea-level rise would harm beaches and it may no longer be a draw to tourists resulting in fewer dollars coming to the state. The coast is connected to rivers and streams. Sea-level rise could also impact water quality, resulting in negative impacts to agricultural production, cattle production and even ecotourism businesses that rely on rivers.
The center, housed on the main UCF campus, includes more than 40 faculty members. The center’s researchers are pursuing multiple partnerships with national and international groups to expand its work. Claire Knox, a UCF public administration associate professor, will focus on environmental and emergency management plans and policies. She provides the connection between coastal science and policy making.
“Specifically, my research in Louisiana and Florida concludes that many land use plans lack a hazard mitigation element and are not being fully implemented,” Knox said. “Our environmental policies say one thing, yet do another. Both practices have led to a disjoined effort to restore Louisiana’s coastal wetlands and Florida Everglades ecosystem.”
The problems facing Florida are similar to those found in other states and countries that have coastlines, so the faculty expect that the solutions they develop may become national models. Knox is just one of many faculty who conduct research outside the state of Florida.
“As a Cajun from coastal Louisiana, coastal is personal. It means home,” Knox said, “A home comprised of coastal wetlands that we are losing at a rate of a football field every 45 minutes. This increases the vulnerability of coastal communities, displaces multiple unique cultures, and includes the relocation of the U.S. first climate change refugees at Isle de Jean Charles.”

Armed Services Turn to UCF for Help in Disrupt New Technology

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The U.S. Army and the U.S. Office of Naval Research have turned to the University of Central Florida to help push the limits of additive manufacturing, commonly known as 3-D printing with metallic alloys.
Additive manufacturing looks to use different metallic alloys to print a variety of finished components used in everything from children’s toys to aircraft and naval ships, which is why the armed services are interested in seeing the industry advance. The UCF process, once perfected, promises to be more efficient and mobile.
Yongho Sohn, a Pegasus Professor in the College of Engineering and Computer Science and associate director of the Materials Characterization Facility, is leading work on overcoming the challenges associated with using metallic alloys. With the Army and Navy’s nearly $5 million in grants over the next five years, he expects to be able to accelerate breakthroughs in this area, something that’s been the focus of his 18-year career at UCF.
“Additive manufacturing technology offers unprecedented capability for agility, customization, delivery and, most importantly, design possibilities unexplored due to conventional manufacturing limitations,” Sohn said. “This is a disruptive technology that can change how we manufacture things and, equally important, how we educate and train the next generation of our technology workforce.”
Much like personal printers, toners (the alloy powders) in additive manufacturing determine the range and quality of the materials that can be printed and the resolution of the finished products.
Sohn is working with a team that is exploring the development of new alloys specifically for some of the most technically challenging applications required by Army and Navy.
UCF is positioned to make leaps in this field because of Sohn’s expertise and the resources in his laboratory. It is one of a few university labs in the nation to have the tools to investigate the complete manufacturing process for metallic alloys from powders to finished components.
“Literally we can design a new alloy composition to try by lunch time, make the new alloy into powder form and feed it into the 3-D printer before going home, and have a component printed out when we return to work the next morning so we can run a variety of characterization/testing,” he said.
He is collaborating with Ranganathan Kumar from UCF’s mechanical and aerospace engineering program, Hae-Bum Yun from civil and environmental engineering, and Kevin Coffey and Tenfie Jiang, both from materials science and engineering. External collaborators include scientists from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and Rajiv Mishra from the University of North Texas.
Students and post docs are also benefiting from this cutting-edge research. Several have been trained to use the equipment and certified to conduct research with it. They include: two research scientists, Le Zhou and Ed Dein in the Advanced Materials Processing and Analysis Center, one doctoral student, Holden Hyer from materials and science and engineering and one undergraduate, Sharon Park, a junior in mechanical and aerospace engineering.

Strange Asteroid from Other Solar System Sparks Rush of Excitement Among Astronomers

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A cigar-shaped asteroid making its way through our solar system is capturing the imagination of scientists around the globe.
This is this first confirmed object in our solar system from another star system, which is what got University of Central Florida Associate Professor Yan Fernandez fired up and calling friends to get telescope time at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico last month.
“On very, very short notice they were able to rework the telescope’s schedule —which is set months in advance —to get us four hours of time,” Fernandez said. “Time really was of the essence, since the asteroid was already on its way out of the solar system — since it was discovered after it had already passed by the sun.”
Fernandez and his collaborators published their observations this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“Up to now we’ve really only had our own asteroids to play with, and even though we know asteroids are out there orbiting other stars, we never really had a chance to check out to see if asteroids are made the same way pretty much everywhere or if there are specific things that happen in each planetary system that influence what kind of asteroids you wind up with,” Fernandez said. “In other words, are all asteroids like ours, or are ours unusual?”
He wasn’t alone in jumping at the chance to observe the asteroid. Several astronomers around the globe made frantic calls to get telescope time, including at the European Space Agency’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. Researchers quickly measured the asteroid’s orbit, brightness and color. This was a rare opportunity to collect data to answer some fundamental questions.
The Pan-STARRS survey at the Institute for Astronomy in Hawaii discovered the strange object and named it `Oumuamua. Experts estimate the asteroid could have been coming through the Milky Way for hundreds of millions of years before its encounter with Earth’s solar system.
Fernandez is on a team with Hal Weaver and Casey Lisse from Johns Hopkins University and Bryce Bolin from the University of Washington. The team helped corroborate the shape of the object, its rotation properties and its color, Fernandez said.
“The weirdest thing we found with our particular data is the apparent extreme elongation of the object,” he said. “We just don’t have that many asteroids that are that elongated in our own solar system. We’ve got a real puzzle here, as to whether we’re just really lucky that we got a true oddball asteroid, or if this is a clue about some other process for creating and ejecting asteroids.”
As scientists collect data and answer some questions, a whole host of other questions arise. But that’s just part of the scientific process.
“It’s the real surprises that sometimes lead us to greater discoveries,” Fernandez said.

New Explanation for Mars Clay May Provide Clues for Future Exploration Options

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A study published today in Nature provides a new explanation for how clay formed on Mars, which could help scientists and engineers figure out how to unlock the early climate history of the planet.
“The basic recipe for making clay is you take rock and you add heat and water,” said Kevin Cannon, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Central Florida who led the research while completing his Ph.D. at Brown University. “This same material used for ceramics and pottery on Earth is also found on Mars, and now we think it may have formed beneath a thick steamy atmosphere just after the planet formed.”
There are thousands of clay outcrops on the Martian surface and more buried underground. This kind of clay is formed by the interaction of water with volcanic rock, leading many scientists to conclude there must have been widespread surface water or an active hydrothermal system at some point in Martian history. But the new research suggests the clays formed during the creation of the Martian crust itself, long before any water could have flowed on the planet. The scattering of the clay would be the result of impacts on the Red planet years after its initial formation.
Cannon and his co-authors, planetary scientists at Brown, said the scenario offers a means of creating widespread clay deposits that doesn’t require a warm and wet climate or a sustained hydrothermal system on early Mars. State-of-the-art climate models suggest an early Mars where the temperature rarely crept above freezing and where water flow on the surface was sporadic and isolated.
To test his theory, Cannon and his team recreated the conditions of early Mars in a lab at Brown. They used synthetic Mars basalt, high temperatures and pressure vessels to see what would happen. The results of the two weeks of testing supported the team’s hypothesis.
Then the team worked to create computer models to run simulations about what would have happened to the clay over time as the planet faced impacts from asteroids, which are evidenced today by the large craters seen on the surface. The simulations took more than a year to account for dozens of variables.
“One of the complications that comes up in Mars evolution is that surface weathering doesn’t seem to have had the capacity to produce the extent of mineral alteration that we see,” said John Mustard, a planetary science professor at Brown and study co-author. “We’re certainly not trying to discount other alteration mechanisms entirely. Surface weathering and other types of alteration surely occurred at different points in Martian history, but we think this is a plausible way to explain much of the widespread clay we see in the oldest Martian terrains.”
Together the lab experiments and computer modeling support the new theory. By better understanding the formation of the clay and its evolution over time, researchers will have more clues in figuring out the earliest history of Mars and potentially other planets, Cannon said.
Cannon joined UCF in July to work with Professor Dan Britt, who also runs NASA’s Center for Lunar & Asteroid Surface Science. Britt is also working with private asteroid mining companies and on several NASA missions including Lucy and New Horizons. Cannon said he was drawn to UCF because of the Planetary Sciences Group’s reputation and the university’s goals to conduct research that can make an impact.
“It was really exciting to me to come here where the work is hands-on and you are potentially helping prep for space exploration,” Cannon said. He also was the recipient of the university’s Preeminent Postdoctoral Program, which helps fund postdoctoral scholars.
Cannon has a Ph.D. in earth, environmental and planetary sciences from Brown University. He also has a degree in geological sciences from Queen’s University in Canada. His research focus at UCF includes diverse topics within planetary science, particularly surface mineralogy, comparative planetology and resource utilization. He is currently working on creating realistic Mars and asteroid regolith simulants.
Co-investigators on the paper are Stephen W. Parman and John F. Mustard from the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Brown University.

Important Foraging Hotspots for Loggerhead Turtle Rookery Identified

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UCF alumna Simona Ceriani today published a new study that finds sea turtles are what they eat – but where they eat may be even more important.
Ceriani, who is a tenured research scientist with Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, collaborated with three UCF Department of Biology researchers on the study, published here in Scientific Reports.
“Where you eat and what you eat matters for humans and we found that it does, in fact, matter for turtles,” Ceriani said. “We found that females who eat in southern areas tend to have more offspring.”
During a nine-year period, the scientists examined chemical signatures of more than 700 loggerhead turtles, which nest at the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge south of Melbourne. Coupled with GPS tracking, the team was able to map the signatures across the western Atlantic Ocean from the waters off Nova Scotia to the Yucatán.
Florida is one of the major nesting grounds for loggerhead turtles in the United States. The Carr refuge accounts for 14 percent of the loggerhead nests in the northwest Atlantic, which is the largest subpopulation in the world.
The study showed that most Carr female loggerheads do not leave the coastal waters that fall under the U.S. jurisdiction. However, the foraging areas where the refuge nesters migrate from vary from year to year. Turtles spend 99 percent of their time in the water, so tracking their whereabouts can prove difficult. The chemical analysis costs $10 per turtle compared to $2,000 to $5,000 required for individual GPS tracking.
“We need to know where they go so that we can protect them, if they need to be protected,” Ceriani said.
As a result of the study, conservation biologists such as Ceriani, will look at two key locations to protect sea turtles: the waters off eastern Central Florida and the waters of Andros Island in the Great Bahama Bank. The turtles that forage in the Bahamas produce more hatchlings than those who forage in the waters near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.
“This is a cool new tool that could help focus conservation and manage efforts,” she said. “Since most turtles remain in the United States, what we can do can have a really positive or a detrimental impact. We are the steward for this species.”
For Ceriani, this research had special meaning. She graduated in 2014 with her Ph.D. in conservation biology from UCF, and now three years later she has significantly extended her doctoral research as the coordinator for Florida’s sea turtle nesting program. A position she took just two months after graduating.
It was also an opportunity to work once again with researchers from UCF. The study was a result of a collaboration with biologists John Weishampel and Kate Mansfield and retired biologist Llewellyn Ehrhart. Michael Wunder of the University of Colorado, a specialist in the analysis of stable isotopes, was also a key member of the team.
“It was amazing working with John and Llew who were both of my committee co-chairs and I owe a lot to them both professionally and personally,” Ceriani said.
Next on her to-do list: a trip to the Great Bahama Bank to investigate the results in the field. She will apply the techniques used in this study to her next one, to continue to unravel the complexity of Florida sea turtle migratory patterns.