Dr. Dick van Oevelen
Tenure track
Department: Ecosystem Studies
T. +31 (0) 113 577 489 
F. +31 (0) 113 573 616 
Dick.van.Oevelen(at)nioz.nl

Visiting address:

Korringaweg 7

4401 NT Yerseke

The Netherlands

Postal address:

Postbus 140

4400 AC Yerseke

The Netherlands

• Deep-sea food webs
• Cold- and warm-water coral reefs
• Physiology of corals and sponges

• Food web modeling and data assimilation
• Linear inverse modeling
• Stable isotopes at natural abundance and tracer level
• Compound-specific analysis (carbohydrates, fatty acids and amino acids)

Corals and sponges - sensitive to drill cutting exposure?

Drill cuttings, i.e. sediment and weighting agents, are released into the water column during oil drilling. The resulting plumes may smother vulnerable marine ecosystems in Norway such as cold-water corals and sponges. Within the projects DIACORA and SedExSponge, we use data from experiments to model the physiological impacts of the drill cutting exposure on corals and sponges by the Dynamic Energy Budget theory (DEB).

The role of sponges on tropical reefs

Sponges are ubiquitously present on tropical reefs and have an impressive filtering capacity. Together with my colleague Jasper de Goeij (UvA) we test the hypothesis that sponges recycle dissolved organic matter efficienctly on the reef and thereby retain energy and nutrients within the reef community. The VPRO made a nice TV documentary on it (in Dutch with English sub-titles).

Deciphering the link between cold-water corals and fish

Cold-water corals build large reef structures along the European margins. There is evidence that various fish species occur in high densities around cold-water coral reefs. CoralFISH investigates the link between cold-water coral reefs and fish. We focus in particular on the food web link between the reef community and fish by 1) measuring total food processing using the Eddy correlation system, 2) determining the food web structure using stable isotopes analysis and 3) develop food web models of the cold-water coral reef, with emphasis of fish species.

Please find all my publications, including downloadable PDFs, at ResearchGate. 

Highlights:

Mueller, CE, T Lundalv, JJ Middelburg, and D van Oevelen (2013) The symbiosis between Lophelia pertusa and Eunice norvegica stimulates coral calcification and worm assimilation. Plos One 8:e58660-e58660. full text

The cold-water coral L. pertusa and the polychaete E. norvegica live together in close association. In this paper we show that the association is beneficial for both species involved. Calcification by the coral is enhanced, which increases reef strength and the worm takes up more food. The high worm abundance suggests that this symbiosis has implications for the ecosystem scale. 

 Van Oevelen D, K Soetaert, CHR Heip. (2012) Carbon flows in the benthic food web of the Porcupine Abyssal Plain: The (un)importance of labile detritus in supporting microbial and faunal carbon demands. Limnology and Oceanography 7(2): 645–664 full text

Pulses of fresh phytodetritus arriving on the deep seafloor are considered an important food source for organisms living there. Here we merged various data sources from the Porcupine Abyssal Plain (4800 m) and arrive at the conclusion that these fresh pulses are not very important in the diets. Instead, the biota still relies largely on detritus already present in the sediment.

Van Oevelen D, JJ Middelburg, K Soetaert and L Moodley (2006) The fate of bacterial carbon in an intertidal sediment: Modeling an in situ isotope tracer experiment. Limnology and Oceanography 51:1302-1314 full text 

Biogeochemical cycling in most sediments is dominated by heterotrophic bacteria, yet we understand very little of the factors that control bacterial biomass. A this study, we used intepretated data from an stable isotope tracer data with a model experiment and concluded that grazing by fauna represents only a minor fate, instead mortality (e.g. viral lysis) seemed to be the dominant fate of bacterial carbon production.