Feature Channels: Marine Science

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Tens of thousands of endangered sharks and rays are caught by small-scale fisheries off the Republic of the Congo each year, new research shows.

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Under normal conditions, the floating macroalgae Sargassum spp. provide habitat for hundreds of types of organisms. However, the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt (GASB) that emerged in 2011 has since then caused unprecedented inundations of this brown seaweed on Caribbean coastlines, with harmful effects on ecosystems while posing challenges to regional economies and tourism, and concerns for respiratory and other human health issues.

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Killer whales are some of the oceans’ top predators, but even they can be exposed to environmental pollution. In the largest study to date on North Atlantic killer whales, researchers in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology report the levels of pollutants in 162 individuals’ blubber.

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Scientists using natural tracers off Queensland’s coast have discovered the source of previously unquantified nitrogen and phosphorous having a profound environmental impact on the Great Barrier Reef.

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Genes sfrp and smoothened are crucially important for regeneration of lost organs. Scientists have found out that regeneration of sea cucumbers depends on genes sfrp (sfrp1/2/5, sfrp3/4) and gene smo.

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Biologists have analyzed about 200 articles dedicated to composition of connective tissue (Extracellular Matrix) of echinoderms. That has enabled them for the first time to compare the composition of extracellular matrix of echinoderms and vertebrates.

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The “Margaritaville” in Jimmy Buffett’s famous song isn’t a real place, but it’s long been associated with the Florida Keys. This string of tropical islands is home to the only living coral barrier reef in the continental US, along with many animals found nowhere else in the world.

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A team of researchers from Queen Mary University of London and the University of Campinas in Brazil has found that tropical forest ecosystems are more reliant on aquatic insects than temperate forest ecosystems and are therefore more vulnerable to disruptions to the links between land and water.

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The Gulf Stream is intrinsic to the global climate system, bringing warm waters from the Caribbean up the East Coast of the United States. As it flows along the coast and then across the Atlantic Ocean, this powerful ocean current influences weather patterns and storms, and it carries heat from the tropics to higher latitudes as part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. A new study published today in Nature Climate Change now documents that over the past 20 years, the Gulf Stream has warmed faster than the global ocean as a whole and has shifted towards the coast. The study, led by Robert Todd, a physical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), relies on over 25,000 temperature and salinity profiles collected between 2001 and 2023.

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Details of past climate conditions are revealed to researchers not only by sediment samples from the ocean floor, but also by the surface of the seafloor, which is exposed to currents that are constantly altering it.

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Acoels have been found to host a wide diversity of symbiotic, photosynthetic microalgae.

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New study shows signs of early creation of modern human identities. Ancestors collected eye-catching shells that radically changed the way we looked at ourselves and others.

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Laden with dissolved salt, Antarctic waters can hover just above freezing and even dip below it. Temperatures this low would likely kill the animals that prosper in warmer waters further north. Yet, some creatures have found ways to live in this inhospitable cold.

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RUDN University biologists and colleagues from Egypt and Saudi Arabia were the first to study the effect of nanoparticles of the natural polymer chitosan on the fish's health in aquaculture. It turned out that chitosan nanogel increases the resistance to a dangerous yeast by 22%. It increases the productivity of fisheries.

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A new device, currently being designed by a University of Adelaide PhD candidate, could help to close a loophole currently being exploited by illegal wildlife traffickers.

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During a recent review of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s recovery plans for more than 200 endangered and threatened vertebrate species in the United States, Michigan State University researchers made an interesting discovery.

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Scientists from Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University have found out unique properties of Asian plant, that help to struggle with vermin at fish farms.