Feature Channels: Marine Science

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A new study helps to solve the mystery of missing plastic fragments at sea. Scientists selected microplastics prevalently found on the ocean surface and irradiated them with a solar simulator system. They found that simulated sunlight increased the amount of dissolved carbon in the water, making those tiny plastic particles tinier. Direct, experimental proof of the photochemical degradation of marine plastics remains rare. This work provides novel insight into the removal mechanisms and potential lifetimes of a select few microplastics.

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Too many of the plastic cups, chip bags, cigarette butts and take-out containers you see littering California’s beaches don’t stay on the sand. An estimated 17.6 billion pounds of plastic make their way into the world’s oceans annually, the equivalent of dumping a garbage truck full of plastic into the ocean every minute—and 80 percent of that comes directly from littering on land.

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A team of engineers from the National University of Singapore has developed a highly sensitive system that uses a smartphone to rapidly detect the presence of toxin-producing algae in water within 15 minutes. This technological breakthrough could play a big role in preventing the spread of harmful microorganisms in aquatic environments, which could threaten global public health and cause environmental problems.

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A University of Washington team is leaving to study how fall storms, dwindling sea ice and vulnerable coastlines might combine in a changing Arctic.

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A marine geobiologist falls for the ‘brains’ and beauty of an ancient single-celled creature that can change its shell into a variety of geometric shapes.

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Hurricanes can destroy nesting sites, reduce ocean oxygen, increase beetle populations inland

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According to a new study published today [Nov. 4, 2019] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 40 years of reduced mercury use, emissions, and loading in the Great Lakes region have largely not produced equivalent declines in the amount of mercury accumulating in large game fish.

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Raman microspectroscopy is a laboratory technique to produce molecular fingerprints of materials, however fluorescence has interfered with its applications. Now scientists have devised a photochemical technique, published in Scientific Reports, that suppresses fluorescence.

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Satellites now play a key role in monitoring carbon levels in the oceans, but we are only just beginning to understand their full potential.

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By creating protocells in hot, alkaline seawater, a UCL-led research team has added to evidence that the origin of life could have been in deep-sea hydrothermal vents rather than shallow pools.

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Although concentrations of chemicals and pollutants like salt and nutrients have increased in the deep waters of Lake George, they’re still too low to harm the ecosystem at those depths, according to an analysis of nearly 40 years of data published Thursday in Limnology and Oceanography.

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Research on zoo animals focuses more on "familiar" species like gorillas and chimpanzees than less well known ones like the waxy monkey frog, scientists say.

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Those beaches, as we know them today at least, almost certainly will not last. By the end of the 21st century, more than $150 billion in property along our coast could be under water. That's because the level of the sea is rising at an alarming rate, putting these areas at risk for devastating floods.

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You’d think that losing 25 percent of your genes would be a big problem for survival. But not for red algae, including the seaweed used to wrap sushi. An ancestor of red algae lost about a quarter of its genes roughly one billion years ago, but the algae still became dominant in near-shore coastal areas around the world, according to Rutgers University–New Brunswick Professor Debashish Bhattacharya, who co-authored a study in the journal Nature Communications.

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Cooperation is one of the most important abilities for any social species. From hunting, breeding, and child rearing, it has allowed many animals -- including humans -- to survive and thrive.

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“Narwhal: Revealing an Arctic Legend” has been on exhibit at The Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History since 2017 and is due to go on tour of North America in 2020. Museum visitors can view panoramic Arctic landscape images, touch a cast of a narwhal’s spiral tusk, hear narwhal vocalizations and read Inuit narwhal legends. This Saturday evening, Oct. 26, in a one-night-only debut as part of a family game night at the museum, visitors who don the Microsoft HoloLens headset will be drawn into an infinitely more interactive experience of 3-D images of the sea creatures swimming all around them.

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Meltwater ponds riddle a kilometer-thick ice shelf, which then shatters in just weeks, shocking scientists and speeding the flow of the glacier behind it into the ocean to drive up sea level. A new study puts damage by meltwater ponds to ice shelves and sea level into cool, mathematical perspective.

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The largest synthesis and a first of its kind study of important marine areas conducted to date reveals that a large portion of earth’s oceans are considered important and are good candidates for protection.

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Fossil coral records provide new evidence that frequent winter shamals, or dust storms, and a prolonged cold winter season contributed to the collapse of the ancient Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia.

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When waves crash in the ocean, they inject tiny particles into the air that carry organic molecules more than 5,000 years old. This discovery, published in Science Advances by a national team of scientists, helps to solve a long-standing mystery as to what happens to ancient marine molecules.

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World governments and other leadership bodies are taking vital steps to protect the ocean but more progress is urgently needed, Oregon State University scientists reported today at the Our Ocean Conference.

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A new study finds the western South Atlantic humpback population has grown to 25,000 whales. Researchers believe this new estimate is now close to pre-whaling numbers.

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ASU Professor Michael Angiletta Angilletta and his co-authors have been studying self-deception in crayfish for about 10 years. They combined mathematical modeling with an experiment to show that crayfish meet the criteria for self-deception.

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A team of engineers and marine biologists built a better suction cup inspired by the mechanism that allows the clingfish to adhere to both smooth and rough surfaces, such as rocks in the area where the tide comes and goes.

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Threats to coral reefs are everywhere—rising water temperatures, ocean acidification, coral bleaching, fishing and other human activities. But new research from the University of Delaware shows that 3-D printed coral can provide a structural starter kit for reef organisms and can become part of the landscape as fish and coral build their homes around the artificial coral.

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With the help of new technologies, a team led by the University of Washington has confirmed that piranhas lose and regrow all the teeth on one side of their face multiple times throughout their lives. How they do it may help explain why the fish go to such efforts to replace their teeth.

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The American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics 72nd Annual Meeting will take place on Nov. 23-26, 2019, in Seattle, Washington. Journalists are invited to attend the meeting for free. Live press webcasts, featuring a selection of newsworthy research, will take place during the meeting. Fluid dynamics is an interdisciplinary field that investigates visible and invisible phenomena from a wide range of disciplines including engineering, physics, biology, oceanography, atmospheric science and geology.

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The economic potential of the oceans is expected to double from US$1.5 trillion in 2010 to US$3 trillion by 2030. Yet managing this growth should be undertaken in a safe and just manner caution a team of international researchers.

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When Florida families settle down to enjoy a seafood dinner they may not realize the main dish wasn’t freshly caught in the nearby Gulf of Mexico, but rather farmed off the coast of Panama. The process of farming seafood in the ocean, known as mariculture, is a growing trend yet little is known about the trajectories of its development.

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Deep-sea mussels, which rely on cooperative symbiotic bacteria for their food, harbor a surprisingly high diversity of these bacterial "cooks": Up to 16 different bacterial strains live together in the mussel's gills, each with its own abilities and strengths. Thanks to this diversity of symbiotic bacterial partners, the mussel is prepared for all eventualities. The mussel bundles up an all-round carefree package, a German-Austrian research team including Jillian Petersen from the University of Vienna and Rebecca Ansorge and Nicole Dubilier from the Max-Planck-Institute for Marine Microbiology now reports in Nature Microbiology.

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As new moms, North Atlantic right whales tone down their underwater vocalizations and "whisper" to their young calves to avoid attracting predators

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A study published by researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) shows that polystyrene, one of the world’s most ubiquitous plastics, may degrade in decades or centuries when exposed to sunlight, rather than thousands of years as previously thought. The study published October 10, 2019, in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters.

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There may be a connection between food comas—resting after eating—and the formation of long-term memories, a team of neuroscientists concludes based on its study on brain activity in sea slugs.

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A recent study by WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society), the University of Miami, and Universidad de Puerto Rico has detected a decrease in the average size of adult queen conch (Lobatus gigas) in the waters of Belize, possibly the result of fishers using shell length rather than thickness as a reliable indicator of age.

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New research shows that long-term changes in diseases in ocean species coincides with decades of widespread environmental change.

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Local conservation can boost the climate resilience of coastal ecosystems, species and cities and buy them precious time in their fight against sea-level rise

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An international team of scientists is launching a study into the effects of marine hypoxia – oxygen loss that is linked to climate change – on fish species and their food webs in three locations around the world. The team will study fish from Lake Erie, the Baltic Sea and a Gulf of Mexico estuary to assess how exposure to hypoxia affects fish and their habitat. The scientists will also investigate the economic impact of the changes, which is sometimes difficult to pinpoint.

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A new study finds that shoreline recreational fishing will likely suffer significantly due to climate change. The study finds some regions of the U.S. may benefit from increasing temperatures, but those benefits will be more than offset by declines in fishing elsewhere.

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Corals exude chemical defenses against bacteria, but when heated in the lab, those defenses lost much potency against a pathogen common in coral bleaching. A key coral's defense was heartier when that coral was taken from an area where fishing was banned and plenty of fish were left to eat away seaweed that was overgrowing corals elsewhere.

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Talk about a windfall! Researchers at Nova Southeastern University (NSU) Halmos College of Natural Sciences and Oceanography have received more than $4 million in grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA.)

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An international research team led by Giuseppe Marramà from the Institute of Paleontology of the University of Vienna discovered a new and well-preserved fossil stingray with an exceptional anatomy, which greatly differs from living species. The find provides new insights into the evolution of these animals and sheds light on the recovery of marine ecosystems after the mass extinction occurred 66 million years ago.

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Researchers from Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS) in Denmark and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in the U.S. devised a way to accurately estimate the weight of free-living whales using only aerial images taken by drones.