NUS Tropical Marine Science Institute

TMSI Research Seminar
𝐂𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐩𝐨𝐝𝐬: 𝐁𝐢𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲, 𝐓𝐚𝐱𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐲, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐒𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐒𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐚𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐞

🗣️ By Mr. Leow Yu Xun
Marine Biology & Ecology Lab, Tropical Marine Science Institute

📅 Date: Wednesday, 24 June 2026
🕞 Time: 10 - 11AM
📍 Format: Hybrid
In-person: TMSI Conference Room, S2S Building, 18 Kent Ridge Road, Singapore 119227
🎤 Host: Dr. Tan Koh Siang
🔗 Register here: https://lnkd.in/g9pH6a7r

Seminar Overview
Copepods dominate the pelagic mesozooplankton community in the marine environment. These tiny crustaceans play crucial roles in the marine ecosystem by transferring energy across trophic levels. In commercial aquaculture, copepods have gained increasing attention as potential live feed supplements for fish and shrimp larvae due to its suitable prey size and promising nutritional value. Understanding copepod morphology, taxonomy and life cycles are fundamental for furthering ecological studies and commercial applications, particularly in the tropics. This seminar provides an overview of copepod biology and the discovery of a new copepod species from Singapore. The new species was distinguished from its congeners based on morphological characteristics and molecular analyses. Culture conditions and nutritional profiles were also examined to assess its potential as live feed for aquaculture applications. These findings highlight the importance of biodiversity studies in Singapore and the potential of locally sourced copepods as live feed candidates for sustainable aquaculture.

Over the weekend, one of our researchers, Dr. Hari Vishnu, spoke at the Art Science museum at the 𝐈𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐄𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐒𝐲𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐮𝐦, in conjunction with an art series "Forms of Life: Beyond the Human", and giving scientific context to the exhibit "𝐒𝐞𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐞" and wrapping up World Ocean Week.

The exhibit by Marshmallow Laser Feast is an exploration into living systems, exploring how immersive technologies can translate non-human perception, such as the sonic world of whales, into embodied experience. At his talk, Dr. Vishnu drew on research in underwater acoustics and bioacoustics, exploring how marine life senses, navigates and communicates through sound. His talk revealed the ocean as a dynamic acoustic environment, where species inhabit richly layered sonic ecologies that challenge conventional human understandings of space and perception. This was followed by an exciting panel discussion with artists and researchers bringing complementary perspectives to the symposium.

Link: https://www.marinabaysands.com/museum/programmes/talks/immersive-ecologies.html

As part of , our Head of Marine Biology and Ecology Laboratory (MBEL), Dr Tan Koh Siang, shared his perspectives at the Deep Shift: Into the Ocean Opening Symposium organised by the ArtScience Museum. He was invited as a panellist for this special convening held in conjunction with World Ocean Day.

Thank you to the ArtScience Museum for bringing together voices from across disciplines for this meaningful conversation.

Photo credit: Sophia Meyers

🐬On this , we are proud to showcase 2 dolphin-related Masters student projects undertaken at TMSI. Two students, two fascinating angles on the same remarkable animal.

🔊 Xin Hui developed a detector to pick out dolphin clicks and burst pulses from the chaos of snapping shrimp noise — a classic needle-in-a-haystack problem, underwater.
🔊 Pengkun HOU used deep learning to reconstruct object shapes using acoustic echoes, mimicking the way dolphins do.

All students have completed their projects and received great feedback for their work.

The ocean has a lot to teach us — and dolphins might just be the best professors.

Happy !

Did you know that seagrass meadows provide food, shelter and nursery habitats for many marine species, while also helping to protect our coastlines and capture carbon?

We're excited to see our researcher, Ow Yan Xiang, featured for her efforts to better understand and restore Singapore's seagrass ecosystems.

Here's to protecting the habitats that keep our oceans thriving: https://news.nus.edu.sg/world-ocean-day-dr-ow-yan-xiang

This month's Journal of Acoustic society of America's cover page features a paper on glacier-trapped bubbles and their acoustics co-authored by TMSI researchers, and also showcases a beautiful photo from Hornsund fjord, Svalbard. The paper sheds light on the physics of glacier-trapped bubbles released during melting, which further aids efforts to use acoustics to monitor climate-change induced impacts at polar glaciers, including those in the Antarctic and Greenland.

The beautiful photo featured on the May cover of JASA was provided by Dale Stokes of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the coauthors of the featured article, "Potential energy of air bubbles in glacier ice and its conversion into acoustic energy," (https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0043866).

Also highlighted on the cover:
- "Noise emissions from ultrasonic antifouling and their potential effects on marine mammals" (https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0043895)
- "Increasing ultrasound field-of-view with reduced element count arrays containing large elements" (https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0043843)
- "Comparison among four psychophysical procedures used to assess sound localization" (https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0043914)
- "Tracking ships with submarine cables: Unsupervised arrival time detection and event localization using distributed acoustic sensing" (https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0043844)

The feature and highlighted articles are free to read in the month of June!

Instytut Geofizyki PAN
NUS Tropical Marine Science Institute

Two venomous box jellyfish species from the genus 𝘊𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘹 have been identified in Singapore’s coastal waters — including 𝘊𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘹 𝘣𝘭𝘢𝘬𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪, a newly described species.

Led by researchers from the Tropical Marine Science Institute and the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, the study combines morphological and genetic analyses to better understand the biodiversity and distribution of box jellyfishes in Southeast Asia. The findings also highlight the importance of improving awareness and monitoring of venomous marine species in our region.

Authors: Iffah Iesa, Cheryl Lewis Ames, Nicholas Wei Liang Yap, and Danwei Huang

Published in the Raffles Bulletin of Zoology, a peer-reviewed open-access journal published by the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, National University of Singapore

📝 Authors: Iffah Iesa, Cheryl Lewis Ames, Nicholas Wei Liang Yap, and Danwei Huang

📖 Read the full paper:https://lkcnhm.nus.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2026/05/RBZ-2026-0026.pdf

Two marine-robotics related breakthrough papers have been recently published by the Acoustic Research Laboratory, one in IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's RA-L and the other one in IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society's JOE, tackles one of the hardest constraints in tetherless underwater ROV operation, sending images through acoustic links with almost no bandwidth to spare.

Building on their earlier work with NVSPrior, a novel-view-synthesis based method, this paper takes prior-based image compression out of the lab and into the turbid waters off St. John's Island, Singapore. The result: iNVS-w, a field-hardened refinement strategy that achieves significantly lower communication bitrates than classical codecs while preserving perceptual quality where it counts.

This is the second and third journal from ARL on tetherless ROVs, and a few more to come so stay tuned.

1. 📄 Luyuan Peng, Yuen Min Too, M. Chitre, Hari Vishnu, B. Kalyan, Rajat Mishra, SooPieng Tan
"Field Validation of Prior-Based Image Compression for Tetherless Operation of Underwater Remotely Operated Vehicles", IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Apr 2026
🔗 https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2026.3688083

2. 📄 L. Peng, Y. M. Too, M. Chitre, H. Vishnu, B. Kalyan, R. Mishra, S. P. Tan
"Image Compression Using Novel View Synthesis Priors", IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, May 2026
🔗 https://doi.org/10.1109/JOE.2026.3674685

🌊 TMSI Research Seminar
Multidisciplinary investigations of Arctic deep-sea extreme environments and transferable insights to tropical studies
🗣️ By Drs Claudio Argentino & Inés Barrenechea Angeles
UiT-ROMEO Group, The Arctic University of Norway (Tromsø)

📅 Date: Wednesday, 15 April 2026
🕒 Time: 3:00 – 4:00 PM (SGT)
📍 Format: Hybrid
In-person: TMSI Conference Room, S2S Building, 18 Kent Ridge Road, Singapore
🎤 Host: Dr Tan Koh Siang
🔗 Register here: https://nus-sg.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Z9xWsgnzQMyOreBvWaQYLA

Seminar Overview:
Arctic extreme environments, such as cold seeps and hydrothermal vents, can reveal unexpected links to tropical studies and sea-level research. They are associated with unique biogeochemical processes and faunal assemblages closely connected to subsurface fluid migration activities. However, they are increasingly threatened by climate change and anthropogenic activities. In this presentation, we show how we apply a multidisciplinary and multiproxy approach to characterize biogeochemical processes and faunal assemblages. You will see how these processes are intricately linked to carbon cycling.