Feature Channels: Marine Science

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Researchers have described a little known yet fascinating aspect of the behavior of Lybia crabs, a species which holds sea anemones in each of its claws (behavior which has earnt it the nickname ‘boxer’ or ‘pom-pom’ crab). In a series of experiments, they showed that when these crabs need an anemone, they will fight to steal one from another crab and then both crabs will split their anemone into two, creating identical clones.

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How were the Earth’s solid deposits of iron ore created? Dr. Itay Halevy suggests that, billions of years ago, “green rust” formed in seawater and sank to the ocean bed, becoming an original source of banded iron formations. While this would have been just one means of iron deposition, green rust seems to have delivered a large proportion of iron to our early ocean.

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After more than a year of data collection, analysis and mapping, the University of Georgia River Basin Center and the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute recently published a comprehensive survey of Southeastern watersheds and the diverse aquatic wildlife that live in these freshwater ecosystems.

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Iowa State's Neal Iverson is working with an international team on two projects that aim to build more realistic computer models of glacier flow. The researchers hope to understand how glaciers will speed up and add to sea-level rise as the climate warms.

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An international team of researchers has discovered why fresh water, melted from Antarctic ice sheets, is often detected below the surface of the ocean, rather than rising to the top above denser seawater.

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Research scientists at Nova Southeastern University (NSU) have been studying the genetics of great white and great hammerhead sharks, and their work brings us a few steps closer to understanding – from a genetic sense – why sharks exhibit some characteristics that are highly desirable by humans (specifically, rapid wound healing and possible higher resistance to cancers.)

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A highly toxic form of mercury could jump by 300 to 600 percent in zooplankton – tiny animals at the base of the marine food chain – if land runoff increases by 15 to 30 percent, according to a new study. And such an increase is possible due to climate change, according to the pioneering study by Rutgers University and other scientists published today in Science Advances.

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A new study compiling 3,000 years of change in reefs in the western Caribbean by Smithsonian scientists and colleagues reveals compelling evidence that parrotfish, which eat the algae that can smother corals, are vital to coral-reef health.

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A team including University of Utah mathematician Kenneth Golden has determined how Arctic melt ponds form, solving a paradoxical mystery of how a pool of water actually sits atop highly porous ice.

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Humboldt State University researchers have been awarded a $271,000 federal grant to help two Northern California fishing communities improve the social, economic, and environmental sustainability of their waterfronts.

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Sea level in the Northeast and in some other U.S. regions will rise significantly faster than the global average, according to a report released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Moreover, in a worst-case scenario, global sea level could rise by about 8 feet by 2100. Robert E. Kopp, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University, coauthored the report, which lays out six scenarios intended to inform national and regional planning.

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A new University of Washington study finds that one of Alaska’s most abundant freshwater fish species is altering its breeding patterns in response to climate change, which could impact the ecology of northern lakes that already acutely feel the effects of a changing climate.

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Irvine, Calif., Jan. 18, 2017 – University of California, Irvine glaciologists have uncovered large oceanic valleys beneath some of the massive glaciers flowing into the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica. Carved by earlier advances of ice during colder periods, the subsurface troughs enable warm, salty water to reach the undersides of glaciers, fueling their increasingly rapid retreat.

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Vitamin B-12 exists in two different, incompatible forms in the oceans. An organism thought to supply the essential vitamin B-12 in the marine environment is actually churning out a knockoff version.

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Conditions suitable to support complex life may have developed in Earth's oceans — and then faded — more than a billion years before life truly took hold, a new University of Washington-led study has found.

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An international team of researchers conducted a comparative genomic analysis to gain insights into the genome structure and evolution of the diatom Fragillariopsis cylindrus, as well as its role in the Southern Ocean.

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Fishing communities can survive ― and even thrive ― as fish abundance and market prices shift if they can catch a variety of species and nimbly move from one fishery to the next, a new University of Washington study finds.

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A long-running research and conservation project is helping save an at-risk species of turtle.

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The acidification of the ocean expected as seawater absorbs increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will reverberate through the West Coast’s marine food web, but not necessarily in the ways you might expect, new research shows.

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A team of seismologists analyzing the data from 671 earthquakes that occurred between 30 and 280 miles beneath the Earth's surface in the Pacific Plate as it descended into the Tonga Trench were surprised to find a zone of intense earthquake activity in the downgoing slab. The pattern of the activity along the slab provided strong evidence that the earthquakes are sparked by the release of water at depth.

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Ice core records from the two poles show that during the last ice age, sharp spikes in Arctic temperatures triggered shifts in the winds around Antarctica.

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Bioengineers at The University of Nottingham are testing how to use shrimp shells to make biodegradable shopping bags, as a ‘green’ alternative to oil-based plastic, and as a new food packaging material to extend product shelf life.

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Scientists have published one of the largest genetic studies ever conducted on the humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) for the purpose of clarifying management decisions in the Southern Hemisphere and supporting calls to protect unique and threatened populations, according to WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society), the American Museum of Natural History, Columbia University, and other organizations.

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Current changes in the ocean around Antarctica are disturbingly close to conditions 14,000 years ago that led to the rapid melting of the Antarctic ice sheets and a three metre rise in global sea levels.

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A new study led by researchers from Moss Landing Marine Labs of San Jose State University, California State University Monterey Bay and University of California Santa Cruz examines how ocean acidification may negatively affect some juvenile rockfish, a key marine prey base to the Calif. ecosystem.

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A new University of Washington study has found the annual migration of some beluga whales in Alaska is altered by sea ice changes in the Arctic, while other belugas do not appear to be affected.

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The individual and the group: insignificant alone, awesome together. Like ants in a colony or neurons of a brain, the collective action of single actors can beautifully coalesce into something more complex than the parts.

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Eelgrass, a marine plant crucial to the success of migrating juvenile salmon and spawning Pacific herring, is stable and flourishing in Puget Sound, despite a doubling of the region's human population and significant shoreline development over the past several decades.

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An analysis of the strongest tropical storms over the last half-century reveals that higher global temperatures have intensified the storms via enhanced rainfall. Rain that falls on the ocean reduces salinity and allows typhoons to grow stronger.

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The things we consume, from iPhones to cars to IKEA furniture, have costs that go well beyond their purchase price. What if the soybeans used to make that tofu you ate last night were grown in fields that were hewn out of tropical rainforests? Or if that tee-shirt you bought came from an industrial area that had been carved out of high-value habitat in Malaysia?

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A new University at Buffalo pilot study found that 41 percent of scuba divers experienced dental symptoms in the water. Recreational divers should consider consulting with their dentist before diving if they recently received dental care.

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Marine low clouds hover in the lowest couple of kilometers above the world’s oceans. They produce little but drizzle, and could never match their deeper mid-continent cousin clouds for dramatic weather and severe storms. But marine low clouds are vastly important to the world’s climate and energy balance.

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Surface meltwater that drains to the bed of the Greenland Ice Sheet each summer causes changes in ice flow that cannot be fully explained by prevailing theories.

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More sea turtles laid eggs on Broward's beaches than ever before - thanks to increased awareness and education

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Scientific discovery can come from anywhere, but few researchers can say the answers to their questions would come from the pea-sized bones in the head of a six-foot-long, 200-pound prehistoric freshwater fish.

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Research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that successful fisheries management can be best achieved by implementing and enforcing science-based catch or effort limits.

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Wild barramundi populations are likely to be at risk under ocean acidification, a new University of Adelaide study has found.

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Scientists at the University of Southampton have discovered six new animal species in undersea hot springs 2.8 kilometres deep in the southwest Indian Ocean. The unique marine life was discovered around hydrothermal vents at a place called Longqi (‘Dragon's Breath’), 2000 kilometres southeast of Madagascar and is described in the journal Scientific Reports.

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What's their secret and can humans learn from them?

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Biodiversity on earth is greatest in the tropics with the number and variety of species gradually diminishing toward the poles. Understanding exactly what shapes this pattern, known as the latitudinal diversity gradient, is not just key to knowing the nature of life on Earth, but it also could help scientists slow biodiversity loss and protect areas of the globe that generate a disproportionate variety of species.

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Oil spills could be cleaned up in the icy, rough waters of the Arctic with a chemically modified sawdust material that absorbs up to five times its weight in oil and stays afloat for at least four months.

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Research professor Kathleen Hunt has found that baleen stores a wide range of hormonal data that can help chart a female whale’s reproductive history–data which she hopes can be used to help repopulate them.

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On July 17, more than 70 million tons of ice broke off from the Aru glacier in the mountains of western Tibet and tumbled into a valley below, taking the lives of nine nomadic yak herders living there. Researchers conducted a kind of forensic analysis of the disaster, and the cause was likely climate change.

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Scientists closely tracking the survival of endangered Sacramento River salmon faced a puzzle: the same high temperatures that salmon eggs survived in the laboratory appeared to kill many of the eggs in the river

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Scientists have called superoxide out as the main culprit behind coral bleaching: The idea is that as this toxin build up inside coral cells, the corals fight back by ejecting the tiny energy- and color-producing algae living inside them. In doing so, they lose their vibrancy, turn a sickly white, and are left weak, damaged, and vulnerable to disease.

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The National Advisory Committee for the Tulane Nitrogen Reduction Challenge has selected five finalists for its $1 million cash prize, which will be awarded to the team that presents the best solution to combat hypoxia – the deadly deficiency of oxygen that creates annual “dead zones” in the world’s lakes and oceans.

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– Endangered leatherback sea turtles are known for their open-ocean migratory nature and nomadic foraging habits – traveling thousands of miles. But a Cornell University naturalist and his colleagues have discovered an area along the Mozambique coast that the turtles have made their permanent home

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Scientists -- including Iowa State's Alan Wanamaker -- have sorted and studied thousands of clam shells to build a 1,000-year record of ocean conditions and climate changes at a spot just off North Iceland.

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A little over a year ago, McGuire began the Florida Microplastic Awareness Project, a citizen science project that has trained volunteers throughout Florida to gather data about microplastics in coastal waters. So far, volunteers have collected and analyzed 770 water samples at 256 locations. These citizen scientists found an average of eight piece of plastic per sample. 82 percent of plastic found was microfiber, an unexpected finding.

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Hearing is a vital sense for marine mammals who use it to forage, communicate and navigate. Many of these mammals produce specific vocalizations that can be used to identify the species and track their locations via acoustic monitoring. Traditionally, scientists have used underwater microphones to listen for marine mammals, either on the seafloor or towed behind a boat. But now scientists can use autonomous underwater vehicles, gliders and floats specially equipped with hydrophones, to listen to marine mammals in ways impossible until now.