How does the Great Barrier Reef get its nitrogen fix?
Thursday, June 15, 2017 - 06:51
in Biology & Nature
When Captain James Cook and the botanist Sir Joseph Banks navigated Australia's Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in the 1770s they described blooms of "sea sawdust" we now know to be the cyanobacterium Trichodesmium. Similarly, in 2014, a UTS led research voyage found the species in abundance, but with the benefit of new molecular biological techniques they were also able to identify other important species of bacteria that could help solve a scientific puzzle.