Nearly half of the fish caught worldwide are from stocks that are scientifically monitored and, on average, are increasing in abundance. Effective management appears to be the main reason these stocks are at sustainable levels or successfully rebuilding, according to a new study led by the University of Washington.
Cardiff University scientists have shed new light on the Earth's climate behaviour during the last known period of global warming over 14 million years ago.
A hybrid remotely operated vehicle developed by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) took the first known automated sample performed by a robotic arm in the ocean. Last month, an international team of researchers used one of WHOI’s underwater robots, Nereid Under Ice (NUI), to explore Kolumbo volcano, an active submarine volcano off Greece’s famed Santorini island.
The mysterious disappearance of Greenland's Norse colonies sometime in the 15th century may have been down to the overexploitation of walrus populations for their tusks, according to a study of medieval artefacts from across Europe.
A team of researchers from the Mechanobiology Institute at the National University of Singapore investigated the science behind the formation of the ‘V’ patterns – also known as chevron patterns – in the swimming muscles of fish. The study focused on the myotome (a group of muscles served by a spinal nerve root) that makes up most of the fish body. These fish muscles power the fish’s side-to-side swimming motion and the chevron pattern is thought to increase swimming efficiency. The research team found that these patterns do not simply arise from genetic instruction or biochemical pathways but actually require physical forces to correctly develop.
Coastal wetlands provide stunning views and are hosts to a vast biodiversity. But they provide another service to the warming Earth: they capture carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in their sediment at high rates. In the United States alone, coastal wetlands can offset the yearly carbon dioxide emissions from 800,000 cars. But as sea level rises with climate change, will coastal wetlands be overwhelmed, or will they retain their power as carbon sinks?
Existing genetic variation in natural populations of Mediterranean mussels allows them to adapt to declining pH levels in seawater caused by carbon emissions. A new study by biologists from the University of Chicago shows that mussels raised in a low pH experimental environment grew smaller shells than those grown at normal pH levels, but the overall survival rate of mussels grown under both conditions was the same.
While many conservation plans focus on only environmental indicators for success, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)’s coral reef program is trying a relatively new approach: focusing on both social and ecological processes and outcomes to ensure a long-term future for coral reef systems, according to a newly published study.
An international team of geoscientists led by Caltech has used fiber optic communications cables stationed at the bottom of the North Sea as a giant seismic network, tracking both earthquakes and ocean waves.
Microorganisms play important roles in the health and protection of coral reefs, yet exploring these connections can be difficult due to the lack of unspoiled reef systems throughout the global ocean. A collaborative study led by scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the Centro de Investigaciones Marinas - Universidad de La Habana (CIM-UH) compared seawater from 25 reefs in Cuba and the U.S. Florida Keys varying in human impact and protection, and found that those with higher microbial diversity and lower concentrations of nutrients and organic carbon—primarily caused by human activities—were markedly healthier.
Ocean scientists investigate the internal body clocks of sea anemones to determine if fluctuating temperatures play a role in their daily rhythms.
Researchers in Environmental Science & Technology report that a large desalination plant in Australia has the unexpected benefit of attracting some species of fish, increasing their abundance at the discharge site.
The wind over deep-sea waters offers the potential to become one of the country’s largest renewable energy sources. University of Texas at Dallas researcher Dr. Todd Griffith has spent years working on an offshore turbine design that can convert those deep-ocean winds into electricity. Recently, Griffith received a $3.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to take his technology to the next level. The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) award provides support for his team to design and build a prototype for a floating offshore wind turbine. The new grant was part of $26 million in funding from ARPA-E for 13 projects to accelerate floating offshore wind turbine technologies through the Aerodynamic Turbines, Lighter and Afloat, with Nautical Technologies and Integrated Servo-Control (ATLANTIS) program.
U.S. Representative Charlie Crist (D-FL), along with Representatives Steven Palazzo (R-MS), Alan Lowenthal (D-CA), and Chris Smith (R-NJ), introduced the Regional Ocean Partnership Act (H.R. 5390). The bill would authorize Regional Ocean Partnerships as partners with the federal government to address ocean and coastal concerns. It will provide with more consistent funding to help perform the critical mission of supporting ocean and coastal health, sustainability, and resiliency.
Large, old Chinook salmon have mostly disappeared from the West Coast. A new University of Washington and NOAA study points to the recent rise of resident killer whales, and their insatiable appetite for large Chinook salmon, as the main driver behind the decline of the big fish.
Exposure to underwater pile driving noise, which can be associated with the construction of docks, piers, and offshore wind farms, causes squid to exhibit strong alarm behaviors, according to a study by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) researchers published Dec. 16, 2019, in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin.
An extraordinary scientific collection of archived fish, as well as fish and water quality data taken from the Hudson River over more than five decades, has been gifted by Entergy Corporation (Entergy), to the Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS).
If you want to know how climate change and hypoxia -- the related loss of oxygen in the world’s oceans -- affect fish species such as the economically important Baltic cod, all you have to do is ask the fish. Those cod, at least, will tell you that hypoxia is making them smaller, scrawnier and less valuable. A paper published today in the journal Biology Letters points to a link between hypoxia and fish well-being.
Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have been awarded a three-year grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in partnership with Saildrone, Inc. of Alameda, CA, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) to develop data quality tools for a new unmanned wind-powered sailboat-like vehicle capable of long-duration missions to collect vital ocean mapping information.
Dead zones within the world's oceans - where there is almost no oxygen to sustain life - could be expanding far quicker than currently thought, a new study suggests.
If coral reefs are the canary to the ocean's coal mine, it's getting awfully bleak in the Gulf of Mexico.
Stormquakes are a recently discovered phenomenon characterized by seismic activity originating at the ocean floor due to powerful storms. Heavy storms, like hurricanes or nor'easters, can create seismic waves as large as magnitude 3.5 quakes. These tremors caused by the effects of storms on the seafloor are what researchers call stormquakes. Catherine de Groot-Hedlin, who was part of the group that first observed stormquakes, will discuss their properties and meteorological significance at the 178th ASA Meeting.
Fisheries acoustics have been studied for over 40 years to assess biomass and optimize aquaculture applications, and researchers in France have examined the phenomenon of how fish scatter acoustic waves in a dense school of fish contained in an open-sea cage. They developed an approach to help overcome issues encountered in aquaculture relating to the evaluation of the total biomass of dense schools of fish. They will discuss their work at the 178th ASA Meeting.
In partnership with the government of the Dominican Republic, researchers at the Indiana University Center for Underwater Science have opened their fifth "Living Museum in the Sea" in the Caribbean country -- a continuation of the center's holistic approach to protecting and preserving historic shipwrecks as well as their coastal environments.
Microbial communities inside whales may play an important role in the digestion of one of the ocean’s most abundant carbon-rich lipids, known as a wax ester.
Little bits of black carbon littering the ocean floor, separate and distinct from the organic carbon believed to come from the ocean’s surface. The source of that strange, and older, carbon has now been identified by UD researchers. The discovery is an important step in understanding the marine carbon cycle.
A new experiment by the University of Washington has found that some corals are more likely to eat microplastics when they are consuming other food, yet microplastics alone are undesirable.
Killer whale pods each have their own set of calls they use to communicate, sometimes referred to as the pod’s “dialect.” By characterizing a pod’s calls, researchers can track its seasonal movements, gaining a better understanding of the whales’ lives. Jessica Sportelli at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography studies a pod of relatively unknown killer whales in Pond Inlet, Nunavut, Canada and she will describe their repertoire of calls at the 178th ASA Meeting.
The beloved anemone fish popularized by the movies “Finding Nemo” and “Finding Dory” don’t have the genetic capacity to adapt to rapid changes in their environment, according to a new study.
Research from a leading international expert on the health of the Great Lakes suggests that the growing intensity and scale of pollution from plastics poses serious risks to human health and will continue to have profound consequences on the ecosystem.
Oil spills in the ocean can cause devastation to wildlife, so effective cleanup is a top priority. Research shows the effects of chemical herders, which are agents that may be used to concentrate oil spills, on wave breaking.
Climate change is reshaping communities of fish and other sea life, according to a pioneering study on how ocean warming is affecting the mix of species. The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, covers species that are important for fisheries and that serve as food for fish, such as copepods and other zooplankton.
The highly endangered North Atlantic right whale is rapidly altering its use of important habitat areas off the New England coast, signaling disruptive changes in the marine environment.
Despite efforts over multiple decades, there are still no cell lines for marine invertebrates. For the first time, scientists have developed a breakthrough in marine invertebrate (sponge) cell culture, demonstrating exceptionally fast cell division and the ability to subculture the cells. This groundbreaking discovery forms the basis for developing marine invertebrate cell models to better understand early animal evolution, determine the role of secondary metabolites, predict the impact of climate change to coral reef community ecology and develop novel medicines.
Metal copper from agricultural runoff and marine paint leaching from boat hulls poses an emerging threat to soft coral sea fans in the waters around Puerto Rico.
New research shows that when stocks of fish get so low that it becomes a greater challenge to catch them, many anglers step up to the challenge and continue catching fish. This poses a threat to the long-term health of sportfish populations in Wisconsin and in inland recreational fisheries around the world.
A 91-million-year-old fossil shark newly named Cretodus houghtonorum discovered in Kansas joins a list of large dinosaur-era animals. Preserved in sediments deposited in an ancient ocean called the Western Interior Seaway that covered the middle of North America during the Late Cretaceous period (144 million to 66 million years ago), Cretodus houghtonorum was an impressive shark estimated to be nearly 17 feet or slightly more than 5 meters long based on a new study appearing in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Researchers at the University of New Hampshire find that environmental developments caused by climate change are contributing to the transformation of the seafloor to a lower, more patchy seascape dominated by shrub-like seaweed which could impact species habitats and the structure of the food web.
The SeaWorld & Busch Gardens Conservation Fund announced that it has committed $900,000 over the next three years in the fight to save the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale.
If you want to understand what happens when seawater becomes more acidic, ask an oyster farmer. Specifically, talk to one in the Pacific Northwest. Researchers still aren't sure how ocean acidification (OA) affects ocean water exactly, but oyster larvae in Washington State are already dying by the billions. Over the next 50 years, OA is predicted to reduce U.
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