In early 2022, long-spined sea urchins in St. Thomas began to quickly die in large numbers. Scientists rushed in to find the cause and have discovered that a microscopic parasite swarms the body and spines of the urchins, eating them alive.
The researchers describe a system of floating geotextile filters that efficiently remove suspended solids, algae and the nutrients from a shallow lake.
On the U.S. Virgin Island of St. Croix, the ruins of a Danish sugar plantation built from harvested coral bricks could be the key to understanding how and why the area was decimated by the 18th-century transatlantic slave trade.
Ocean-based hydrophones in the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO)’s seismic-acoustic monitoring network could provide a better look at how ocean temperatures are changing over time, according to a presentation at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)’s 2023 Annual Meeting.
The high seas have been colonized by a surprising number of coastal marine invertebrate species, which can now survive and reproduce in the open ocean, contributing strongly to the floating community composition.
Scientists have discovered extensive, ancient deep-sea coral reefs within the Galápagos Marine Reserve (GMR) – the first of their kind ever to be documented inside the marine protected area (MPA) since it was established in 1998.
PCB has been banned in most countries since the 1970s, but that doesn't mean it no longer exists. Now, deep-sea researchers report that they have found PCB at the bottom of the Atacama Trench in the Pacific Ocean.
The Virginia Tech media relations office has the following experts available for interviews surrounding the environment, energy, and sustainability. To schedule an interview, please contact [email protected]. Rising seas threatens U.S. coastlines and cities A recently released report from the U.N. on climate change found that rising sea levels are "unavoidable for centuries to millennia due to continuing deep ocean warming and ice sheet melt, and sea levels will remain elevated for thousands of years.
Research led by UC San Diego and Harvard has traced the evolutionary adaptations of octopus and squid sensing capabilities. The researchers describe for the first time the structure of an octopus chemotactile receptor, which octopus arms use for taste-by-touch exploration of the seafloor.
Killer whales (also known as orcas) are intelligent predators. While it’s known that killer whales in the Pacific Northwest exploit widely different food types, even within the same region, we know much less about the feeding habits of those found throughout the North Atlantic.
Until recently, fish that eat coral — corallivores — were thought to weaken reef structures, while fish that consume algae and detritus — grazers — were thought to keep reefs healthy.
Brian McDermott, a Case Western Reserve scientist, is reporting a discovery about unexpected asymmetry on the hair cells of zebrafish that allow them to detect movement with greater sensitivity from the back than the front. “This shows that fish have hair cells that are actually tuned to sense different water directions,” McDermott said. “In humans, our cochleas have hair cells that are similarly tuned to be able to hear different frequencies.” McDermott said the finding also advances our understanding of “the long-sought mechanotransduction (Mec) channel” in living creatures.
Rutgers geneticists, working with an international team of scientists, have conducted the most comprehensive sequencing yet of the complete DNA sequence of the little skate – which, like its better-known cousin, the stingray, has long been viewed as enigmatic because of its shape. The scientists, writing in Nature, reported that by studying the intricacies of Leucoraja erinacea’s genome, they have gained a far better understanding of how the fish evolved from its ancestor – which possessed a much narrower body – over a period of 300 million years to become a flat, winged bottom-dweller.
To better understand which factor has the greatest impact on the concentration of dissolved oxygen, researchers at Penn State used a deep learning model to analyze data from hundreds of rivers across the United States.
A wax that is derived from a commonly grown marine microalga could be the next big thing in cosmetics and personal care products, thanks to a recent license agreement between the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Western Washington University (WWU)—which jointly own the patents—and Upwell Cosmetics, a start-up materials company founded in Woods Hole, Mass.
Natural disasters can devastate a region, abruptly killing the species that form an ecosystem’s structure. But how this transpires can influence recovery. While fires scorch the landscape to the ground, a heatwave leaves an army of wooden staves in its wake. Storm surges and coral bleaching do something similar underwater.
New research reveals the progress scientists at The University of Toledo are making in their ongoing efforts to capture and remove invasive grass carp from the Great Lakes.
The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) announced today that Monica P. Medina, the first diplomat in the U.S. designated to advocate for global biodiversity, has been named WCS President and CEO, effective June 1, 2023.
The Cooperative Institute for the North Atlantic Region (CINAR), led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), is pleased to announce the appointment of four CINAR Fellows in Quantitative Fisheries and Ecosystems Science, which is supported in part by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center. The fellows are Robert Griffin, School for Marine Science and Technology at UMass Dartmouth; Lisa Kerr, University of Maine; Kathy Mills, Gulf of Maine Research Institute; and Mei Sato, WHOI.
The seas surrounding the Arctic are important fisheries and ecological regions; they are also among the areas most affected by climate change. The effects of warming waters and loss of sea ice on the biodiversity of these waters, and hence their ecology, is still not fully understood.
The scope and scale of threats facing coral reefs demand new ways of approaching the questions that need to be answered in order to ensure the future of reefs worldwide. That’s the conclusion of a paper released in print today by a multi-disciplinary scientists and engineers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).
Current methods to monitor red tide are limited. Using AUTOHOLO, a new autonomous, submersible, 3D holographic microscope and imaging system, a study is the first to characterize red tide in the field and breaks new ground for monitoring harmful algal blooms.
The ability to model and predict the size of ocean waves is important for the fishing industry from both logistic and economic perspectives. Essentially, the bigger the waves, the more expensive the fish.
A study published in Nature Communications by an international team of climate scientists uncovers the physical mechanisms that can cause uneven future warming in the Indian Ocean and corresponding shifts in monsoon precipitation.
Lehigh Engineering researcher Arup SenGupta has developed a novel way to capture carbon dioxide from the air and store it in the “infinite sink” of the ocean.
Cape Cod’s salt marshes are as iconic as they are important. These beautiful, low-lying wetlands are some of the most biologically productive ecosystems on Earth.
The Indo-West Pacific is the largest, most biodiverse marine ecosystem on Earth, and many of the species it supports have comparably wide ranges. Writing in “The Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin noted that “… many fish range from the Pacific into the Indian Ocean, and many shells are common to the eastern islands of the Pacific and the eastern shores of Africa, on almost exactly opposite meridians of latitude.”
A research group including Professors Mitsumasa Koyanagi and Akihisa Terakita of the Osaka Metropolitan University Graduate School of Science has investigated both the genetic information and structure of the photoreceptor rhodopsin, responsible for detecting dim light, of whale sharks to investigate how they can see in the dim light at extreme depths.
Climate change. Overfishing. Seabed floor mining. These are some of the epic challenges that would be addressed by a historic United Nations treaty protecting ocean biodiversity that gained backing in early March when a significant majority of nations agreed on language supporting it. Covering the “high seas,” the enormous belt of brine spanning nearly half of the globe, the U.
Scientists aboard a U.S. research vessel in the tropical Atlantic are taking advantage of the ship’s long-planned path through the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt to take some of the first samples from a massive, ongoing bloom. Photos and video from the ship show the algae mats on the surface of the eastern Atlantic in the belt that extends from west Africa to the Gulf of Mexico.
Diagnostic imaging such as X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans are important tools in monitoring the health of humans and animals. But for researchers in the field, it is difficult to administer these common tests on wild populations.
A research group from Nagoya University in central Japan has discovered three new species of bioluminescent polycirrus worms from different parts of Japan.
New research reveals how salt marshes along the U.S. East Coast have responded to accelerating sea level rise by building elevation more quickly to keep pace with the sea over the last century.
For wild animals, false alarms are the most widespread form of misinformation. Deploying camera observatories in a coral reef in French Polynesia, researchers have shown that even in the absence of predators, escape events occur frequently in natural groups of foraging fish but rarely spread to more than a few individuals. These animals form dynamic information exchange networks and adjust their responsiveness to visual cues based on the recent history of sensory inputs from neighbors.
Fish can adjust their sensitivity to the actions of others – such as fleeing due to a false alarm – to reduce the risk of responding to misinformation, according to a new study. Other animals, including humans, may also have these decision-making mechanisms.
In a paper published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters, an international research team composed of scientists affiliated with more than a dozen institutions, including the California Academy of Sciences, propose a first-of-its-kind framework for governments around the world to evaluate their preparedness for—and guide future policies to address—ocean acidification, among the most dire threats to marine ecosystems.
A team of scientists led by a Brown University researcher has developed a new method for monitoring when deep sea methane deposits convert to gas and rise toward the seafloor in amounts that were previously too small to detect.
The diet quality of fish across large parts of the world’s oceans could decline by up to 10 per cent as climate change impacts an integral part of marine food chains, a major study has found.
The first study into the biological response of the upper ocean in the wake of South Pacific cyclones could help predict the impact of warming ocean temperatures, New Zealand researchers believe.
A new study provides novel documentation of kelp forest decline along the west coast of the U.S. and Mexico in response to the 2014–2016 record-breaking marine heatwave, along with evidence of regional recovery.
UWF Sea3D Lab recently partnered with The Mariners' Museum and Park, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NOAA Monitor National Marine Sanctuary to create artifact replicas recovered from the shipwreck of the USS Monitor.
For the first time, leading researchers from the fields of healthcare, ocean science, and social science have collaborated to quantify plastic's considerable risks to all life on Earth.
A new study is providing an unprecedented examination of oxygen loss on coral reefs around the globe under ocean warming. Led by researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a large team of national and international colleagues, the study captures the current state of hypoxia—or low oxygen levels—at 32 different sites, and reveals that hypoxia is already pervasive on many reefs.
A new study published today in the journal Nature brings scientists one step closer to knowing how or when massive quantities of water arrived on earth.
Researchers at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University found that an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) was associated with the deaths of more than 330 New England harbor and gray seals along the North Atlantic coast in June and July 2022, and the outbreak was connected to a wave of avian influenza in birds in the region.
A Secchi disk – historically called a “dinner plate” by sailors – is used in the open ocean to measure concentrations of microscopic algae called phytoplankton.
This support expands FAU Harbor Branch’s extensive aquaculture and food security program focused on replenishing queen conch populations throughout the Caribbean. It also enables development of a conceptual master plan for a 25-acre innovation hub on Grand Bahama for researchers working to solve issues of island sustainability.