Feature Channels: Marine Science

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Seasonal movement and density can guide military, energy planning.

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Salmon have an ace up their sleeve -- or in their gills -- when facing challenging conditions that could affect their hearts, according to a study led by a University of Guelph researcher. The researchers found that carbonic anhydrase (CA) can help improve delivery of oxygen to the heart.

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Plastic waste could find its way deep into the ocean through the faeces of plankton, new research from the University of Exeter and Plymouth Marine Laboratory shows.

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A survey of shark scientists reveals that a majority favor sustainable fishing of the predators rather than a ban on shark fishing.

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Just like a strong financial portfolio contains shares from different companies, the diverse subpopulations of herring from different bays and beaches around Washington's Puget Sound collectively keep the total population more stable, a new study finds.

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NOAA Fisheries and Ocean Discovery Institute give San Diego students students are real-world research experience that's opening them up to a world of possibilities.

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University of Delaware researcher Mark Moline recently co-authored a paper in Robotics on the advantage of linking multi-sensor systems aboard autonomous underwater vehicles to enable the vehicle to synthesize data in real-time so it can independently make decisions about what action to take next.

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The relationship between our future carbon dioxide emissions and future climate change depends strongly on the capacity of the ocean-carbon sink. That is a question climate scientists have so far been unable to answer. In a new paper, a research team headed by Galen McKinley, professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, describes the best modeling approach to date for arriving at an answer to this and other crucial climate questions

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Jennifer Jacquet, an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Environmental Studies, has received a Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation to examine the feasibility of altering fisheries policies on the high seas.

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From the Yellow River in China to the Mississippi River in Louisiana, researchers are racing to better understand and mitigate the degradation of some of the world's most important river deltas, according to a University of Colorado Boulder faculty member.

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Every year from March through October, something truly amazing happens: sea turtles make their way onto the beaches of South Florida to lay the eggs of the next generation.

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Sharks have a reputation for having voracious appetites, but a new study shows that most coral reef sharks eat prey that are smaller than a cheeseburger.

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Doctoral student first to investigate the ecology of the orcas that live around Newfoundland and Labrador.

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A study at Oregon State University has concluded that significant outbreaks of viruses may be associated with coral bleaching events, especially as a result of multiple environmental stresses.

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A new weakly electric mormyrid fish genus of two new species has been described from only three specimens collected over a period of 13 years in the rivers of the Central African country of Gabon. The genus has been named Cryptomyrus, meaning 'hidden fish' in Greek, and is the first new genus to be described within the family Mormyridae since 1977.

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Coral reef islands and atolls in the Pacific are predominantly surrounded by vast areas of ocean that have very low nutrient levels and low ecological production. However, the ecosystems near these islands and atolls are often extremely productive and support an enhanced nearshore food-web, leading to an abundance of species and increased local fisheries.

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Two new Cornell University studies show how diverse marine organisms are susceptible to diseases made worse by warming oceans. The first study warns that warm sea temperatures in 2015 may increase the levels of epizootic shell disease in American lobster in the northern Gulf of Maine in 2016. The second provides the first evidence linking warmer ocean temperatures with a West Coast epidemic of sea star wasting disease that has infected more than 20 species and devastated populations since 2013.

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Predicting the expected loss of ice sheet mass is difficult due to the complexity of modeling ice sheet behavior. To better understand this loss, a team of Sandia National Laboratories researchers has been improving the reliability and efficiency of computational models that describe ice sheet behavior and dynamics.

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Researchers at the RIKEN Evolutionary Morphology laboratory and other institutions in Japan have shown that complex divisions in the vertebrate brain first appeared before the evolution of jaws, more than 500 million years ago.

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New Florida State University research appearing today in Scientific Reports, a Nature journal, challenges a 2007 study published in Scienceclaiming that shark declines led to rising populations of cownose rays, which were responsible for the collapse of oyster and shellfish industries along the Atlantic coast.

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As the Arctic continues to change due to rising temperatures, melting sea ice and human interest in developing oil and shipping routes, it’s important to understand belugas’ baseline behavior, argue the authors of a new paper.

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The human fingertip is a finely tuned sensory machine, and even slight touches convey a great deal of information about our physical environment. It turns out, some fish use their pectoral fins in pretty much the same way. And do so through a surprisingly similar biological mechanism to mammals.

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The ocean’s power to rein in carbon and protect the environment is vast but not well-understood. But now, an international team of scientists has begun to illuminate how the ocean plucks carbon from the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming, and shuttles it to the bottom of the sea.

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A 10-year collaborative project led by biologists from Kansas State University and Washington State University has discovered how the Atlantic molly is able to live in toxic hydrogen sulfide water.

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Ocean acidification (the ongoing decrease in the pH of the Earth's oceans, caused by the uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere), is affecting the formation of the skeleton of coralline algae which play an important part in marine biodiversity, new research from the University of Bristol, UK has found.

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Noise from motorboat traffic makes some fish more than two and a half times more likely to be eaten by predators, according to an international team of researchers including biologists from the University of Saskatchewan.

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Climate change projections that look ahead one or two centuries show a rapid rise in temperature and sea level, but say little about the longer picture. Today (Feb. 8, 2016), a study published in Nature Climate Change looks at the next 10,000 years, and finds that the catastrophic impact of another three centuries of carbon pollution will persist millennia after the carbon dioxide releases cease.

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A pink flatworm-like animal known by a single species found in waters off Sweden has puzzled biologists for nearly six decades. New discoveries half a world away by a team of scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, the Western Australian Museum, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) have helped properly identify these elusive creatures through genetic analysis.

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The rate that fish are captured by predators can double when boats are motoring nearby, according to pioneering work led by a University of Exeter marine biologist.

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New clues are helping UD researchers develop an online map to help Mid-Atlantic fishermen avoid catching Atlantic sturgeon.

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Underwater sound linked to human activity could alter the behaviour of seabed creatures that play a vital role in marine ecosystems, according to new research from the University of Southampton.

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The smooth surfaces of much of the plastic waste rapidly increasing in the ocean appear to provide poor habitat for animals -- that is, until barnacles step in.

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In 2010, a research team garnered attention when it published evidence of finding the first animals living in permanently anoxic conditions at the bottom of the sea. But a new study, led by scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), raises doubts.

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Rising global temperatures may skew gender imbalance among the marine turtle population, according to new Florida State University research.

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NOAA initiative recognizes partners that are helping to improve the nation's readiness against extreme weather, water and climate events.

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Nova Southeastern University researchers continue their research into the long-term effect the Deep Water Horizon oil spill had on the Gulf of Mexico.

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Findings by Rosenstiel School researchers have important implications for ocean life.

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When an endangered orca is in hot pursuit of an endangered salmon, sending out clicks and listening for their echoes in the murky ocean near Seattle, does the noise from the nearby shipping lane interfere with them catching dinner? To find out scientists measured underwater noise as ships passed their study site 3,000 times. This unprecedented characterization of ship noise will aid in the understanding of the potential effects on marine life, and help with possible mitigation strategies.

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The California Natural Resources Agency has named University of California, Irvine biologist Tim Bradley to the science advisory committee for the state effort to preserve its largest inland body of water.

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Laziness can help you succeed… if you’re a nurse shark. A new research paper from Mote Marine Laboratory reveals that nurse sharks have the lowest metabolic rate measured in any shark — new evidence of the sluggish lifestyle that has helped the species survive for millennia.

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With California in the fourth year of a historic drought, there is much controversy over how to supply cities, farms, and ecosystems with the water they need. Technology may help solve the puzzle.

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A new global analysis of seafood found that fish populations throughout the world's oceans are contaminated with industrial and agricultural pollutants, collectively known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs). The study from researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego also uncovered some good news¾concentrations of these pollutants have been consistently dropping over the last 30 years.

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Coastal seagrass ecosystems cover some 200,000 square kilometers and account for an estimated 15 percent of carbon fixed in global ocean. In Nature, a team including DOE Joint Genome Institute researchers describes the first marine angiosperm genome: the eelgrass Zostera marina.

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A new video released by the Gulf’s ocean observing system highlights the nonprofit organization’s mission to help protect and preserve the Gulf.

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The old proverbial saying, “Give a Man a Fish and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man to Fish and You Feed Him for a Lifetime,” aptly describes the newly-formed partnership between FAU’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute and Aquaculture without Frontiers. They will work jointly to support and promote responsible and sustainable aquaculture farming to help enhance food security and alleviate poverty and malnutrition in developing and impoverished countries.

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When scientists from McGill University learned that some fish were proliferating in water polluted by oil extraction in Southern Trinidad, they thought they had found a rare example of a species able to adapt to crude oil pollution. But when they tested them, these guppies were actually less adapted to pollution than similar fish from non-polluted areas.

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A Florida State University researcher and his team have developed a comprehensive analysis of oil in the Gulf of Mexico and determined how much of it occurs naturally and how much came from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill. And more importantly, their data creates a map, showing where the active natural oil seeps are located.

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A new study suggests that current ‘hotspots’ of shark activity are at risk of overfishing, and that the introduction of catch quotas might be necessary to protect oceanic sharks.

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Warming waters fuel algae growth, worsen water quality.