Dissolved Oxygen
Dissolved oxygen (DO) is essential for most marine life and mediating numerous key biological processes over a range of scales. As such, DO is often incorporated into monitoring programs as a key indicator of water quality. In recent decades there has also been growing awareness that climate change is driving loss of DO from the global ocean (ocean deoxygenation), potentially exposing marine organisms to hypoxia (low oxygen stress). As tropical coastal environments may be particularly prone to this phenomenon, understanding physiological impacts of hypoxia to tropical marine organisms is a rapidly growing research area.
Furthermore, given the relationship between DO and temperature (where warmer seawater holds less oxygen), experimental studies are increasingly seeking to measure DO to disentangle organism responses during e.g., heat stress experiments.
Measuring DO in SeaSim
SeaSim has a selection of oxygen-sensing equipment that can be used by researchers wishing to measure DO in their experiments:
- SeaSim has several FireSting-O2 units (manufactured by PyroScience) which allow for optical determination of DO across four individual channels. The FireSting-O2 units can be flexibly paired with needle-type probes, robust probes and sensor spots depending on the specific application, and the proprietary software allows for automatic temperature correction of O2-solubility as needed. FireSting-O2 units can acquire DO data at high temporal resolution (seconds) without consumption of ambient oxygen – making them ideal for capturing dynamic changes in DO during e.g., incubation approaches targeted at examining oxygen-consumption patterns in marine organisms.
- For “point-source” measurements of DO, SeaSim can also provide access to a portable, hand-held multiprobe meter (YSI ProDSS) capable of measuring DO, temperature and conductivity simultaneously.
