Alexander T Lowe

U.S. Federal Government

Littering of cigarette butts is a major environmental challenge. In 2022, ~124 billion cigarette butts were littered in the United States. This litter may pose an environmental justice concern by disproportionately affecting human and environmental health in communities of color or communities of low socioeconomic status. However, the lack of data...

The western Antarctic Peninsula (AP) is experiencing significant changes to sea ice cover, altering the macroalgal cover and potentially affecting the foundation of benthic food webs. We used fatty acid signatures as dietary and physiological trophic biomarkers to test the hypothesis that a gradient of 36-88% mean annual ice cover would affect the...

The Western Antarctic Peninsula supports a diverse assemblage of > 100 described macroalgal species that contribute to the base of coastal food webs, but their contribution to local nearshore food webs is still uncertain across larger spatial scales. The analysis of biomarkers, specifically fatty acids and stable isotopes, offers a tool to clarify...

Coastal food webs that are supported by multiple primary producer sources are considered to be more stable against perturbations. Here, we investigated how declining macroalgal abundance and diversity might influence coastal food web structure along an annual sea ice cover gradient along the Western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP). The most common benthi...

Macroalgal forests dominate shallow hard bottom areas along the northern portion of the Western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP). Macroalgal biomass and diversity are known to be dramatically lower in the southern WAP and at similar latitudes around Antarctica, but few reports detail the distributions of macroalgae or associated macroinvertebrates in the...

Natural and anthropogenic environmental changes in estuaries affect the growth and health of organisms living there, often along spatiotemporal gradients. Throughout the world's estuaries, aquaculture and wild oyster populations support food and cultural systems, so quantifying factors affecting growth may inspire interventions to prevent future lo...

This research combined submersible and scuba observations of red sea urchins (Mesocentrotus franciscanus) in the Salish Sea to explore: 1. Full depth range. We confirmed the prediction that red urchins exceed known depth range of 125m when subtrate and drift kelp is present. 2. Drift algae (detritus) availability to urchins throughout their depth...

For many historical and contemporary experimental studies in marine biology, seawater carbonate chemistry remains a ghost factor, an uncontrolled, unmeasured, and often dynamic variable affecting experimental organisms or the treatments to which investigators subject them. We highlight how environmental variability, such as seasonal upwelling and b...

We tested the hypothesis that underrepresented students in active-learning classrooms experience narrower achievement gaps than underrepresented students in traditional lecturing classrooms, averaged across all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and courses. We conducted a comprehensive search for both published and unp...

Pacific geoduck aquaculture is a growing industry, however, little is known about how geoduck respond to varying environmental conditions, or how the industry will fare under projected climate conditions. To understand how geoduck production may be impacted by low pH associated with ocean acidification, multi-faceted environmental heterogeneity nee...

Algal subsidies are important to basal consumers of the deep benthos where there is little to no primary productivity. Algal detritus such as pieces of kelp that sink into deep habitats can be an important direct nutritional subsidy, but sea urchin feces may provide an additional, indirect energetic link from shallow-water macroalgae to benthic com...

Aquatic structure-formers have the potential to establish mosaics of seston in shallow water if they modify the relative amounts of deposition (or filtration) and resuspension of particles. By sampling surface water adjacent to Lagrangian drifters traveling 0.1 to 2 m above the bottom, we tested the modification of seston in water masses flowing ov...

Global climate change is rapidly altering coastal marine ecosystems that are important for food production. A comprehensive understanding of how organisms will respond to these complex environmental changes can come only from observing and studying species within their natural environment. To this end, the effects of environmental drivers — pH, dis...

Ocean acidification poses serious threats to coastal ecosystem services, yet few empirical studies have investigated how local ecological processes may modulate global changes of pH from rising atmospheric CO2. We quantified patterns of pH variability as a function of atmospheric CO2 and local physical and biological processes at 83 sites over 25 y...

Marine foundation species have strong effects on sympatric species, but the strength may vary along environmental gradients. Climate change is shifting the distribution and magnitude of environmental gradients, making identification of when and where foundation species effects occur necessary for effective management. We reviewed existing work to i...

Global climate change is rapidly altering coastal marine ecosystems important for food production. A comprehensive understanding of how organisms will respond to these complex environmental changes can come only from observing and studying species within their natural environment. To this end, the effects of environmental drivers - pH, dissolved ox...

Pacific geoduck aquaculture is a growing industry, however little is known about how geoduck respond to varying environmental conditions and how production might be impacted by low pH associated with ocean acidification. Ocean acidification research is increasingly incorporating multiple environmental drivers and natural pH variability into biologi...

Shallow water subtidal marine communities along the western Antarctic Peninsula are characterized by dense beds of macroalgae and strikingly dense assemblages of associated amphipods. However, direct grazing by amphipods on the dominant macroalgae is unlikely as most of these algae elaborate secondary metabolites known to be herbivore feeding deter...

Rapid changes, including warming and freshening, are occurring in coastal marine ecosystems worldwide. These environmental changes have the potential to alter ecosystem energetics by influencing availability of food sources and organism physiology. We investigated the influence of oceanographic variability on food availability and quality to benthi...

Biomass from nearshore primary producers can be an important subsidy to both pelagic and benthic communities, which are disconnected in space from sources of production. We examine the role of this macrophyte biomass in two habitats (pelagic and nearshore benthic) in terms of both trophic support and spatial refugia. Experimental benthic “islands”...

Sea urchins are important ecosystem engineers in subtidal ecosystems worldwide, providing biogenic structure and altering nutrient dynamics through intensive grazing and drift algal capture. The current work evaluates red urchin (Strongylocentrotus franciscanus) density on fixed transects through time, individual displacement, and urchin-associated...

Kelps in temperate marine ecosystems produce substantial detrital biomass that provides a carbon subsidy to consumers in neighboring habitats. After detachment, detrital kelp degrades and potentially changes in nutritional quality. Red sea urchins, Mesocentrotus franciscanus, are an abundant consumer of drift algae from the shallow subtidal to >100...

Suspended particulate organic matter (POM) is a primary food source for benthic and pelagic consumers in aquatic and marine ecosystems. POM is potentially composed of many sources, including phytoplankton, bacteria, zooplankton and macrophyte (seaweed and seagrass) and terrestrial detritus. The relative importance of these sources to POM consumers...

Skin is a network of elastin and collagen fibers with variable amounts of organization. While alive, skin is under tension and has been shown to work as an exotendon in some species. The anisotropic properties, direction of elastic and collagen fibers, are largely attributed to the tendon like properties of skin. Marine mammals have a blubber layer...

Benthic marine consumers inhabiting the subphotic zone rely on subsidies of energy synthesized by macrophytes and phytoplankton in the photic zone. The effects of this energy subsidy on the trophic ecology of deep invertebrates are generally unknown. We used fatty acids (FA) and multiple stable isotopes (MSI) as trophic biomarkers to compare tissue...

The first winter in the life cycle of Antarctic krill Euphausia superba is a critical period in which larval survival and recruitment to the adult population are highly sensitive to environmental conditions, yet little is known about larval physiological dynamics during this period. An individual-based model was developed to investigate patterns of...

Antarctic phytoplankton is characterized by a pronounced seasonality in abundance, driven mainly by changes in sunlight. We combined measurements and modeling to describe the influence of changing daylength on fall and winter phytoplankton production in coastal waters of the western Antarctic Peninsula (wAP) in 2001 and 2002. The model was paramete...

We used a remotely operated vehicle to investigate landscape-scale patterns of subtidal drift material and invertebrates within a 60-km(2) marine basin in Washington State. Specifically, we quantified the distribution and abundance of drift macrophytes (seaweed and seagrass) and four macroinvertebrate species across depth and habitat type to depths...