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University of Washington-led research suggests moon jellies are feasting on zooplankton, the various tiny animals that drift with the currents, in the bays they inhabit. This could affect other hungry marine life, like juvenile salmon or herring — especially if predictions are correct and climate change will favor fast-growing jellyfish.
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The Slope Sea off the Northeast United States is a major spawning ground for Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus), a new paper affirms. This finding likely has important implications for population dynamics and the survival of this fish, according to the paper, “Support for the Slope Sea as a major spawning ground for Atlantic bluefin tuna: evidence from larval abundance, growth rates, and particle-tracking simulations,” published in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.
FishSounds.net is the first online, interactive library for the sounds fish make when communicating or interacting with their environment. Fish sounds provide scientists valuable data for studying and conserving underwater ecosystems. An accompanying review study found that just under a 1,000 fish make sounds for communication, though this is likely an underestimate.
New research shows turtles can experience temporary hearing loss from an excess of underwater noise. This phenomenon, previously noted in other marine animals such as dolphins and fish, was not widely understood for reptiles and underscores another potential risk for aquatic turtles. This high volume of sound, referred to as underwater noise pollution, can be caused by passing ships and offshore construction.
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Fish are exposed to pollutants, like tire-derived 6PPD-quinone, in rain runoff. The compound has been linked to massive die-offs of coho salmon. Now, researchers in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology Letters report exposure can also be deadly for two important trout species.
Disposable face masks could be harmful to wildlife, according to researchers who have observed harmful effects of the masks on keystone marine animals in coastal areas.
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A team of scientists used an emerging genetic tool that analyzes DNA in water samples to detect whales and dolphins in New York waters.
Each year, pregnant female elephant seals take an approximately 240-day trek over 10,000 kilometers across the Eastern North Pacific Ocean before returning to their breeding beaches to give birth within five days of their arrival. Now, a study appearing February 28 in the journal biology Current Biology finds that this impressive navigation ability depends on an internal map sense, which functions much like a built-in GPS.
An unnoticed network of channels is cutting across the coastal plain landscape along the Gulf Coast and influencing how water flows, according to research from The University of Texas at Austin that could help predict flooding from major storms in the future.
For the first time, a glider deployed in the Gulf of Mexico traveled south into the Gulf Stream, around the tip of Florida, through the Florida Straits and north to South Carolina — a trip of some 2,387 miles (3,842 km). The trip was a test to see whether the glider could navigate around Florida and up the East Coast successfully while gaining information about multiple marine systems — all during a single mission.
Authors of a new paper recently published in the peer-review journal PLOS One have developed a new Bloom Severity Index and a new Respiratory Irritation Index for red tide blooms in the Gulf of Mexico — the first standardized and objective way to gauge how severe red tides are.
Newly proposed research will test the effects of UV light exposure on chemical contaminants
Single individuals of Atlantic cod and squid occur much further north than previously expected.
Roughly 35 million years ago, Earth cooled rapidly. At roughly the same time, the Drake Passage formed between South America and the Antarctic, paving the way for the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.
Omar Abdul-Aziz, an engineer at West Virginia University, has developed a model that can be utilized on any body of water to predict levels of dissolved oxygen, a contributor to water quality.
The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill was the largest marine oil spill in United States history. The disaster was caused by an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, taking 11 lives and releasing nearly 210 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Twelve years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, scientists are still working to understand where all this oil ended up, a concept known as environmental fate.
The ocean twilight zone, also called the mid-water or the mesopelagic, lies far beneath the sunlit surface waters, about 650 to 3,300 feet deep to be exact. This region is a fundamental part of the ocean that has great benefit to humans – and scientists are working hard to learn more on its role in global climate. The ocean twilight zone helps to transport carbon from the upper ocean into deeper waters, where it is removed from the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years. In the process, the zone can act as a buffer to climate change, slowing the effects of human carbon emissions. Without the benefits that it provides, CO2 levels in the atmosphere would jump by nearly 50 percent, amplifying the speed and severity of climate change. Yet how could the twilight zone simply stop working?
A new study led by the University of Washington found that anaerobic processes occurring on floodplains of the Tonle Sap, the largest lake in Southeast Asia, are important contributors of the carbon dioxide that is dissolved in surface waters. The findings were published Feb. 14 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
– Dr. Ken Buesseler, senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, has been selected as a Geochemistry Fellow by the Geochemical Society (GS) and the European Association of Geochemistry (EAG). The Geochemistry Fellow honor is bestowed upon outstanding scientists who have made major contributions to the geochemistry field. Dr. Buesseler was selected for his innovative contributions to studying cycling of radionuclides in the ocean and their application to the study of the biological carbon pump.
Here are some of the latest articles we've posted in the Physical Science channel.
Dr. Benjamin Van Mooy, Woods Hole Oceanographic senior scientist and Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry Department Chair, is being presented with the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Award from the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO). ASLO presents the award annually to a scientist who has made considerable contributions to knowledge in their field, and whose work will carry on a legacy in future research.
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Gabon's network of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) provides a blueprint that could be used in many other countries, experts say.
More than 1,000 manatees died in 2021, due mostly to starvation. They consume about 100 pounds of seagrass a day, and this staple food is now scarce in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon (IRL). A new study shows that about 7,400 acres of seagrass were lost in the IRL between 1943 and 1994. Between 2011 and 2019, about 58 percent of seagrasses were lost. To help with recovery efforts, researchers are experimenting with growing seagrass in large tanks and then transplanting it into the IRL to try to restore some of the lost seagrass beds.
Over one quarter of Europe’s 20 most highly-fished marine species will be under extreme pressure by 2100 if nothing is done to simultaneously halt climate change, overfishing, and mercury pollution, according to a new UBC study.
A new scientific study shows that all previously proposed body forms of the gigantic Megalodon, or megatooth shark, which lived nearly worldwide roughly 15-3.6 million years ago, remain in the realm of speculations.
Clemson University marine biologist J. Antonio Baeza’s recent discovery of two new marine species has him looking at the future and the past.
A study is the first to unveil the prevalence of plastics in the entire water column of an offshore plastic accumulation zone in the southern Atlantic Ocean and implicates the ocean interior as a crucial pool of ‘missing’ plastics. Results show that small microplastics are critical, underexplored and integral to the oceanic plastic inventory. In addition, findings show that weak ocean current systems contribute to the formation of small microplastics hotspots at depth, suggesting a higher encounter rate for subsurface particle feeders like zooplankton.
High-resolution modeling suggests significant loss of locations that protect against thermal stress.
A new study by researchers in the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering’s St. Anthony Falls Laboratory found that popular wakesurf boats require a greater distance from the shoreline and other boats compared to more typical recreational boats. This distance is needed to reduce the potential impact of their larger waves.
A new study from Cornell University finds that fish are far more likely to communicate with sound than generally thought.
Cuba has just declared Este del Archipiélago de Los Colorados (“East of Los Colorados Archipelago”), a new marine protected area.
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.
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