Gretchen Hofmann

Who is Gretchen Hofmann?

Gretchen Hofmann is professor of ecological physiology of marine organisms at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a B.S. from the University of Wyoming, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in Environmental, Population and Organismal Biology.

She works on the ecological physiology of marine organisms, in particular kelp, invertebrates and perciform fishes. Hofman's work on the effects of changing seawater acidity and temperature on marine life has drawn wide attention.

Hofmann told The Times of India that as marine invertebrates deal with increasing acidity, the larvae have to "re-tune" their metabolism in order to still make a shell. "But this is done at a cost. The physiological changes that are a response to the acidity make the animals less able to withstand warmer waters, and they are smaller," which causes "catastrophic" problems on up the food chain as larger organisms fail to get enough food to survive.

In 2006, Reuters followed her to Antarctica where she drilled through the ice to explore the impact of warming global temperatures on fish. She explained that "“If we learn how the most cold-adapted organisms -- the organisms that are most used to cold and no temperature change -- how they respond, we might learn something about the processes in temperate species, figuring out what pathways to look at that might be changing -- or might not be changing.”