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 .
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.
Read the .