How life manages to persist in unpredictable and extreme environments is a major question in evolution. For aquatic animals, extreme environments include those with little water such as the deserts of central Australia.
UD marine scientists Wei-Jun Cai and David Kirchman have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society, founded in 1848.
As a major source of greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, food production has long occupied an important place in the climate-change discussion.
The Gulf of Mexico Alliance is pleased to announce a new partnership with CITGO as they become the most recent organization to join the Alliance’s Gulf Star Program. Funding from CITGO will support work in Galveston Bay, Texas, to improve conservation efforts for diamondback terrapins, a small species of turtle that lives in coastal marshes.
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In a win-win for commercial fisheries and marine wildlife, researchers have found that using lighted nets greatly reduced accidental bycatch of sharks, rays, sea turtles, and unwanted finfish.
152 billion tonnes of fresh water – equivalent to 20 x Loch Ness or 61 million Olympic sized swimming pools, entered the seas around the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia when the megaberg A68A melted over 3 months in 2020/2021, according to a new study.
Ever wondered whether whales can burp, and why they don’t drown when they gulp down gallons of water and krill? New UBC research may just hold the answer.
Researchers have predicted that expanding the Aransas Pass in Texas could increase the native red drum fish population in the bay.
Many pharmaceutically relevant marine sponges are found only in trace amounts within the source sponge, and it is neither economically nor ecologically feasible to harvest enough wild sponge biomass to supply the necessary quantities for clinical drug development and manufacture. Researchers have come up with a viable solution – develop sponge cell lines for rapid division and successfully culture them in 3D to scale-up production.
A new study led by teams of the Faculty of Biology, the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) of the University of Barcelona, and the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC) of Barcelona has revealed that marine heatwaves associated with the climate crisis are bringing down the populations of coral in the Mediterranean, the biomass of which in some cases has been reduced by 80 to 90%.
Woods Hole, MA (January 19) -- A global effort to map the genomes of all plants, animals, fungi, and other eukaryotic life (organisms with a cellular nucleus) on Earth is entering a new phase as it moves from pilot projects to full-scale production sequencing. This new phase of the The Earth BioGenome Project (EBP) is marked with a collection of papers published January 17 in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science describing the project’s goals, achievements to date, and next steps. Included among these are an ambitious effort co-led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the University of Connecticut (UConn) to obtain fundamental new knowledge of the organization, evolution, functions, and interactions of life in one of Earth’s least-understood regions: the deep ocean.
By drilling deep down into sediments on the ocean floor researchers can travel back in time.
Many nations are calling for protection of 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030 from some or all types of exploitation, including fishing. Building off this proposal, a new analysis led by the University of Washington looks at how effective fishing closures are at reducing accidental catch. Researchers found that permanent marine protected areas are a relatively inefficient way to protect marine biodiversity that is accidentally caught in fisheries. Dynamic ocean management — changing the pattern of closures as accidental catch hotspots shift — is much more effective.
The history of life on Earth has been marked five times by events of mass biodiversity extinction caused by extreme natural phenomena.
Addressing one of the most profoundly unanswered questions in biology, a Rutgers-led team has discovered the structures of proteins that may be responsible for the origins of life in the primordial soup of ancient Earth.
Near the Filchner Ice Shelf in the south of the Antarctic Weddell Sea, a research team has found the world's largest fish breeding area known to date.
Researchers at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering discovered that this natural ecosystem involving feather duster worms (Sabellidae, Annelida) and both heat-generating and heat-absorbing bacteria (Archaea) that consume methane enclathrated — or locked into a crystalline structure — by hydrates in deep marine environments play a key role in maintaining equilibrium that keeps hydrates frozen.
A grant from the National Science Foundation will allow Shayla Sawyer and Rick Relyea, two professors at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, to better understand the growing problem of harmful algal blooms (HABs).
The world’s oceans are hotter than ever before, continuing their record-breaking temperature streak for the sixth straight year.
Microplastics are tiny plastic pieces that can be found in the ocean and atmosphere. Scientists’ current understanding of microplastics is that they are widespread globally, but the impact they have on ecosystems and humans is largely unknown. Current technologies for identifying microplastics are also limited, but a project led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Chemical Sensors Lab is moving researchers closer to an in-field microplastics sensor that measures the amount of plastic particles in water.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI, a global leader in ocean research and exploration, is partnering with two teams selected as finalists in the development of the new Governors Island Climate Solutions Center in New York City. The announcement was recently made by former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and The Trust for Governors Island.
Florida State University researchers have new insight into the complicated puzzle of environmental conditions that characterized the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction (LOME), which killed about 85% of the species in the ocean.
In 2019, researchers witnessed an extreme heat event at Punta Tombo in Argentina, one of the world’s largest breeding colonies for Magellanic penguins. On Jan. 19, temperatures at the site spiked in the shade to 44 C, or 111.2 F, killing at least 354 penguins, nearly three-quarters of whom were adults.
The macroalga giant kelp, which is an iconic and important ecosystem-structuring species found off the coast of California and many other coastlines, can grow 100-feet long within 1-2 years.
Researchers from the University of Adelaide have found that the way fish interact in groups is being upset by ocean acidification and global warming.
In the summer months, sea ice from the Arctic drifts through Fram Strait into the Atlantic. Thanks to meltwater, a stable layer forms around the drifting ice atop the salty seawater, producing significant effects on biological processes and marine organisms.
RUDN University biologist with colleagues from Germany, Egypt, Iran and Thailand proved that wormwood extract helps to improve the immunity of carp and enhance its growth.
The supply of farmed seafood such as salmon and mussels are projected to drop 16 per cent globally by 2090 if no action is taken to mitigate climate change, according to a new UBC study.
In an oceanic omen for climate change’s intensifying effects, new research shows that seagrass suffers from a lesion-filled wasting disease through large swaths of intertidal meadows in the Pacific Northwest. The grasses’ once-vibrant plant root systems are deteriorating, too.
New research from Queen’s University Belfast has led to 184 deep-sea species being added to the global Red List of Threatened Species. With almost two-thirds of the species assessed listed as threatened, it highlights the urgent need to protect them from extinction.
Cellulose diacetate (CDA), a bio-based plastic widely used in consumer goods, disintegrates, and degrades in the ocean far quicker than previously
Penguins may not require passports to travel, but they do need protection, according to an international research team who analyzed 131 scientific papers on penguin movement at sea.
The climate crisis is limiting the availability of krill —small crustaceans that are vital in the marine food chain— during summer in some areas of the Antarctica.
Killer whales will often travel to different areas to target varieties of prey. In a study including eight years of passive acoustic data, researchers monitored killer whale movements using acoustic tools, finding killer whales are spending more time than previously recorded in the Arctic Ocean, despite risks of ice entrapment there. Their readings indicate this change is directly following the decrease in sea ice in the area.
There are more than 300,000 septic systems permitted in six counties adjacent to the 156-mile-long Indian River Lagoon (IRL) in Florida. Researchers assessed water quality and measured stable nitrogen isotopes in groundwater, surface water, and macrophyte tissue to identify nitrogen sources impacting the lagoon.
Ocean predators cannot survive on average concentrations of food found in the water. Instead, they survive by exploiting small patches of food-rich areas peppered throughout the world's waterways. Using active acoustics, researchers found the ocean is widely populated with narrow hotspots of activity. Traditionally, these hotspots are missed with conventional sampling tools, but locating them can provide dynamic layered maps of ocean life. The findings signify ocean food and biota as patchy, varying with depth and location, suggesting animals must find and exploit small-scale aggregations of resources.
Using artificial intelligence techniques, an international team that included Rutgers-New Brunswick researchers have traced the evolution of coccolithophores, an ocean-dwelling phytoplankton group, over 2.8 million years. Their findings, published this week in the journal Nature, reveal new evidence that evolutionary cycles in a marine phytoplankton group are related to changes in tropical seasonality, shedding light on the link between biological evolution and climate change.
New Oregon State University research shows that warm-water habitats can be critically important for the survival of cold-water fish such as trout and salmon.
When a fire broke out on the deck of the M/V XPress Pearl cargo ship on May 20, 2021, an estimated 70-75 billion pellets of preproduction plastic material, known as nurdles, spilled into the ocean and along the Sri Lankan coastline. That spill of about 1,500 tons of nurdles, many of which were burnt by the fire, has threatened marine life and poses a complex clean-up challenge.
Study results on whale song suggest that the consensus response to the question of why humpbacks sing is wrong. The whales don’t sing to attract a mate (reproductive hypothesis), according to Eduardo Mercado III, a UB professor of psychology. They’re singing to find other whales (sonar hypothesis), using mechanisms within their songs that may be comparable to those at work in the eyes of land animals as they examine their environment. “[This isn’t a] feather in the sonar hypothesis cap? It’s more like an arrow through the chest of the reproductive display hypothesis,” says Mercado.
New research finds that Arctic krill have a biological response to changes in light. When it is lightest in the Arctic polar night, usually around the middle of the day known as midday twilight, the krill know to swim down to the bottom in order to hide from predators. When it is darkest in the Arctic polar night, that’s when they swim to the surface in search of bioluminescent food.
The Arctic Ocean has been getting warmer since the beginning of the 20th century – decades earlier than records suggest – due to warmer water flowing into the delicate polar ecosystem from the Atlantic Ocean.
A new, widespread study of the global state of marine coral reef wilderness by WCS, NGS, and university collaborators found that remote ocean wilderness areas are sustaining fish populations much better than some of the world’s best marine reserves.
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has received $750,000 in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to develop next‐generation autonomous robotic technology for environmental monitoring of marine organisms and the seafloor at potential wind energy development areas on the U.S. West Coast.
After the natural warming that followed the last Ice Age, there were repeated periods when masses of icebergs broke off from Antarctica into the Southern Ocean.
Global change is eroding life on earth at an unprecedented rate and scale. Species extinctions have accelerated over the last decades, with the concomitant loss of the functions and services they provide to human societies.
Researchers are continuing a first-of-its-kind evaluation of both the short-term and potential long-term health effects of harmful algal blooms among Florida residents. The study also will be the first-of-its-kind to evaluate the potential effect of exposure to COVID-19. Researchers will explore if there is a relationship between a history of SARS-CoV-2 virus infection and susceptibility to the effects of harmful algal blooms exposure.
Press conferences at the 181st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America will be held Wednesday, Dec. 1, in room 505 at the Hyatt Regency Seattle. The media availabilities will focus on wide range of newsworthy sessions at the upcoming meeting from killer whales spending more time in the Arctic Ocean to knocking over Lego minifigures with time reversal focused vibration. For more information, contact AIP Media.
Eco Resilience Games from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has released the first augmented reality (AR) game focusing on the growing issue of harmful algae blooms.
More than 70% of microplastics found in samples from oceans and rivers could come from the scientists collecting them.
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