BGU Foram's Lab

Cretaceous research

The Late Cretaceous is marked by a world-wide catastrophe, known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event, which led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, as well as many other terrestrial and marine organisms. The latest Cretaceous was also a time of major oceanic and climatic oscillations.Our research is focused on understanding the distribution of Late Cretaceous foraminiferal habitats, documenting their response to global climatic changes, and characterizing their taxonomy, phylogeny and the ecological strategies of individual species. We have characterized foraminiferal assemblages from many Late Cretaceous localities from all over the world, established a detailed depth ranking of species based on stable isotope analyses and showed the importance of high-resolution studies in tracing paleoceanographic changes.

Marine Biomonitoring

Marine biomonitoring is been in practice for few decades, yet has become an urgent matter during the past few years due to increase awareness of possible impact of anthropogenic stressors on marine communities. Forams are considered as one of the most powerful tools for marine biomonitoring. As unicellular organisms with a short reproductive cycle and fast growth rates, they show a quick response to environmental change and serve as extremely sensitive indicators of nutrient availability, salinity, irradiation, oxygen concentration, anthropogenic contaminations as well as temperature fluctuations.Several projects on modern marine environments were already been completed in our laboratory, that combined both field and laboratory experiments.

Molecular genetics

In a recent collaboration with Jan Pawlowski and Maria Holzmann from the University of Geneva, our group has acquired expertise in molecular tools to be able to explore fundamental ecological and oceanographic problems that concern the impact of environmental perturbations on the marine ecosystem. Molecular techniques not only contribute to the establishment of a more robust taxonomic subdivision of foraminifera species, but also provide a better understanding of their environments and a more accurate usage of them as bioindicators. These techniques are now used in our laboratory to investigate the large scale Lessepsian invasion of large benthic foraminifera from the Red Sea to the Eastern Mediterranean.