phytoplankton – Neil Banas

I’m trying to write a book about plankton and fish

My first science zine. Covid-19 lockdown project, month 3. In retrospect I think it’s let down by the lettering, especially because I missed the opportunity to distinguish the two voices in it (it’s a collab with a then-4-year-old). But in true Prof. Dr. Style I’m leaving it on my website anyway. It’s folded from one … Read more

Droplet: self-generation

I made this video for a town hall event called “From the tide pool to the stars” at the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting. It documents the generation of Droplet (2012) from an initial field of seeds. My hope is that it would make one think of things that are very large and things that are … Read more

Early warning for Pseudo-nitzschia HABs on Pacific Northwest beaches: From plankton ecology to operational decision support

Certain species of the phytoplankton Pseudo-nitzschia (PN) produce a potent neurotoxin, domoic acid (DA), that bioaccumulates in shellfish, and can cause severe illness and death in humans. Past outbreaks have caused fisheries closures and millions of dollars of losses to crab and clam harvesters, and contributed to the death of many species of marine mammals. … Read more

The Bering Sea in spring, 1971-2050

The Eastern Bering Sea hosts extremely rich pelagic and benthic fisheries, and also experiences strong interannual variation in both fisheries recruitment and the underlying physics and plankton biology. This paper…

Why is the Northwest coast so productive?

The Pacific Northwest coast is the most biologically productive region of the California Current upwelling system, despite the fact that the upwelling winds are much stronger farther south. How can this be?

Modeling Cascadia

The Cascadia model from the Univ of Washington Coastal Modeling Group is a realistic 3D model, implemented in ROMS, of the North American Pacific Northwest coast from mid-Oregon to mid-Vancouver Island, including the inland waters of the Salish Sea. It was developed as part of the NSF/NOAA PNWTOX (Pacific Northwest Toxins) project, based on previous … Read more

Northwest Coastal Stories: Turbulence and Uncertainty in Science and in Culture

Program on the Comparative History of Ideas (CHID), Oceanography, and Honors Program, 2004–2013 Course announcement: This course will follow Jonathan Raban’s remarkable travelogue Passage to Juneau on a tour through the human and natural history of the Pacific Northwest coastal waters. We’ll discuss chaos theory and the circulation of Puget Sound; coastal ecology and climate … Read more

FISH 330: Climate Impacts on Marine Ecosystems (2013)

Course announcement: This course links the physics of climate to marine ecosystem processes, exploring both observed climate impacts from the past and projected impacts of human-caused climate change in the future. Case studies include a spectrum of organisms from plankton to whales, in polar, sub-arctic, temperate, tropical, and upwelling ecosystems. We will also discuss the … Read more

Adding fine-scale trophic complexity to a plankton model

Natural plankton communities are far more diverse than even a very complicated numerical model can account for. The ASTroCAT model (Allometric/Stochastic Trophic Complexity Analysis Tool) is an experiment in systematically resolving the complexity in phytoplankton–microzooplankton trophic interactions, and exploring the effects of this complexity on ecosystem structure, function, and predictability. This paper… Banas NS (2011) … Read more

“Some warm little pond”

Gallery on flickr. This series consists of sketches in a couple of different families leading up to Droplet (2012). Many of these works were originally shown at the Blindfold Gallery in Seattle in 2012. I wrote a bit about them at the time, and explained a bit more in an interview with SeattleArtBloc. More recently, … Read more

+ More