Inquiring Minds
Highlights from UNH
the seaweed report it to their local department of marine resources, although she cautions that it’s easy to confuse it with a native seaweed known as sea cauliflower (Leathesia marina). The sea potato is an epiphyte, which means it grows on top of other seaweeds. That could give it a competitive advantage, helping it push aside the native species. And its tendency to attach to oyster shells and float off with them has earned it another nickname: the oyster thief. But it’s too soon to know why the sea potato is here and whether it will turn out to be an invasive species. So sightings of brown, puffy seaweed on the beach are no cause for alarm. The sea potato—for the moment at least—is simply a curiosity. —Hillary Rosner
Bad Blood
Not all bullies are on the playground. ullying—on playgrounds, in locker think anything of it.” When she reviewed rooms, online—has garnered Monitoring a new species of seaweed. her specimens later with her adviser, plant national attention in recent years, and indsay Green ’14G wasn’t expecting biologist Christopher Neefus ’82G, he numerous books, movies, and programs to find anything unusual on the sea recognized the seaweed as a type of sea have been developed to address this perfloor that day. It was a routine diving expe- potato—a species he knew wasn’t nor- vasive childhood affliction. But the focus dition for her and her colleague Hannah mally found in Maine. “We set out on a has been almost exclusively on bullying Traggis ’95, ’14G. A doctoral candidate quest to identify it,” Green says. by peers. Now UNH researchers are in plant biology, Green studies seaweed The team developed genetic markers training a lens on a different type of bully: aquaculture—specifically, cultivation of to identify the mystery seaweed, and they one who shares the dinner table, and even local varieties of nori, which is used to found an exact match with samples of DNA, with the victim. wrap sushi. In the summer, she collects Colpomenia peregrina, a Pacific Ocean In a recent study published in the jourblades of wild seaweed to get spores for species found in Nova Scotia since the nal Pediatrics, Corinna Jenkins Tucker, her project. 1960s. Although Green’s discovery, associate professor of family studies, and But on a July day in 2011, Green saw which she and her colleagues reported three collaborators from the UNH Crimes something interesting in the water off the in the journal Botanica Marina, was the Against Children Research Center found coast of Kittery, Maine. It was a seaweed first documented occurrence of the sea- that sibling aggression was associated resembling a big brown beach ball. “I weed in the Gulf of Maine, the brown with the same detrimental effects—anxicollected it because I thought it was really sea potato has since spread rapidly, at ety, depression, anger—as other types cool,” she recalls. “I pressed it out on a least as far south as Cape Cod. Green of bullying. The researchers looked at specimen sheet, filed it away, and didn’t recommends that beachgoers who spot children and adolescents as well as at a
Ocean Interloper
14 • Un i ve rs it y o f Ne w Ha m p s h i r e Ma g a z i n e • Fa l l 2013
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TIMOTHY GRAJEK
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