DTU AQUA National Institute of Aquatic Resources
Centre for Ocean Life
Henrik Dams Allé
Building 202, room 4132
2800 Kgs. Lyngby
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From bacteria to whales, this is how the Villum Center for Ocean Life itself describes their range within the scientific approach they launched with the center in 2012. In 2024 it ends. We drawa portrait of the marine research centre, which has focused its attention on the big lines instead of the individual species when looking at life...
A new major project on marine biodiversity spans national borders and scientific disciplines. DTU is one of 31 European research partners to form the science based effort to understand and help the ocean over the next 4 years – BIOcean5D has been kicked off.
Ecosystems are complex machineries, and our ability to predict how multiple drivers and environmental forcing structure communities are limited. One way to represent and understand organisms, communities and ecosystems is to think in terms of 'traits' rather than species, and how the dominant traits emerge in an evolutionary and ecological...
When in Earth’s history did the ‘rise of the algae’ occur, i.e. the basic element of modern marine ecosystems? A new study uses a mathematical model of the ancient ocean ecosystem to explore a one-billion-year gap in the geological record.
In the oceans, a nearly constant biomass of organisms is found in equal log- intervals of body-size. This large-scale regularity is referred to as the size spectrum. In this new modelling study, we find that parameters of the size spectrum correlate strongly with the export and export efficiency of particles into the deep ocean. These...
Organisms adapt to predation risk by changing their behavior. A new study from the Centre for Ocean Life demonstrates how defensive behaviors of marine pelagic organisms, from phytoplankton to fish, may significantly change the intensity of the biological carbon pump and, hence the ability of the ocean to sequester carbon.
The Metabolic Theory of Ecology states from scaling laws that population-level properties – maximum population growth rate—scales with a -1/4 exponent with size. However, this prediction rests on the assumption that adult and offspring size are proportional. We developed a new theory in The American Naturalist predicting maximum population...
The grant will support 2 PhD students and one post-doctoral researched to develop a mechanistically underpinned Ocean Systems Ecology that describes and models marine ecosystems and their functions based on first principles.
The Centre for Ocean Life is offering new PhD and postdoc positions. Application deadline is October 25.
The Center for Ocean has received a grant from the Danish Science Foundation to understand and describe the present and future state of fish and squid in the world’s oceans.
The Fifth Workshop on Trait-based Approaches to Ocean Life will be held in Knoxville, TN, USA, January 24th-27th 2022.
Nitrogen is essential for all life on Earth. In the global oceans however, this element is scarce, and nitrogen availability is therefore critical for the growth of marine life.
Fish are vertically structured in the water column and this affects what they eat and by whom they are eaten. A new Ocean Life paper has extended the recent FEISTY fish community model to resolve the vertical structure of a fish community. The new model was used to predict the biogeography of marine fish food webs across ocean biomes...
Researchers from the Centre for Ocean Life developed a new method to address simultaneously changes in behaviour and population dynamics for several populations.
On 27 November 2020, Camila Serra Pompei will defend her PhD thesis. The defence can be watched online.
Most models of plankton communities, such as NPZ-type models, ignore the life-cycle (ontogeny) of multicellular zooplankton. Here, we propose a model framework along the Nutrient–Unicellular–Multicellular axis – a “NUM” framework – which incorporates zooplankton ontogeny.
Today’s advice for fisheries management uses the venerable “Beverton-Holt” theory of fish demography. The theory describes the abundance of fish of different ages and how fishing distorts this age-distribution. In the “Center for Ocean Life” we have developed a modern alternative theory, which describes the abundance of fish at different...
One of the most conspicuous features over much of the world’s oceans is the seasonal variation in environmental conditions (e.g. light, temperature, nutrients, food). In this new article from a large team of Ocean Life members (past and present), we seek to uncover patterns in life history strategies that marine organisms adopt to deal...