Deep dive into ocean ecology
Mount Holyoke alumna Lorna Mitchison-Field ’18 was first author on a study of ocean fungi, shedding light on crucial contributors to the marine ecosystem.
By Keely Sexton
Lorna Mitchison-Field ’18 took a deep dive into studying the secret lives of ocean fungi and discovered not only that there was a lot more diversity than expected, but there were also surprising deviations in the cell division cycles among them. The findings were published in Science Daily.
The study, the first of its kind, described 35 different species of marine fungi, many of which had never been studied before.
“There's a lot of diversity in marine fungi — morphological and species diversity, possibly ecological functional diversity — that we don’t know a lot about yet. And it’s really worth digging into,” said Mitchison-Field.
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