Latest oceanbites
The Price of Motherhood: Deepwater Fish Regenerate Their Tails to Increase Reproductive Fitness
What happens if a fish gets its tail bitten off? It must survive the injury, but also decide what is more important: recovering or producing offspring. Read on to find out how a deep-sea fish copes with this dilemma.
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What happens if a fish gets its tail bitten off? It must survive the injury, but also decide what is more important: recovering or producing offspring. Read on to find out how a deep-sea fish copes with this dilemma.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to ride on the back of a whale? Scientists now use a variety of tag technologies and tracking methods to understand the movement of marine animals from whales to sharks to birds to turtles. But how can tracking data be effectively translated into conservation policy that […]
Microplastics are found all throughout our oceans. But in the Red Sea, there are a lot less. Find out how giant clams could be a culprit for getting rid of small plastics. Arossa, S., Martin, C., Rossbach, S., & Duarte, C. M. (2019). Microplastic removal by red sea giant clam (Tridacna maxima). Environmental Pollution. doi:10.1016/j.envpol.2019.05.149 We use […]
The ocean is a big place and trying to study all of the animals living there can take a lot of time, effort, and some pretty expensive technology. Thankfully, a group of scientists may have found an alternative to the current sampling devices : Sponges. Read more about how scientists are looking into using sponges […]
Plamu Salmo salar (or “Atlantic Salmon”, “Black Salmon”, or “Plamu” as it’s known in my neck of the woods) is a culturally, ecologically, and economically vital fish species that has experienced widespread declines over the last century. Damming, habitat degradation, climate change, and aquaculture are all thought to pose significant threats to salmon health, […]
In the face of mass bleaching and other anthropogenic stressors, researchers and scientists alike have been working on ways to both bolster coral reef growth and study coral reef environments without disrupting them – and 3D printing coral structures has been one technique used to do so. However, before the use of 3D models in […]
Between land and sea, coastal ecosystems receive seasonal varieties of food sources that impact organisms at the bottom of the food web, such as mussels. Read on to learn how scientists use stable isotopes analysis to identify what organisms eat, and why this is important for understanding coastal food webs.
When a coral reef suffers from bad environmental conditions like warmer water, sometimes the coral can recover—but sometimes algae will take over the ecosystem instead. Scientists in French Polynesia tested what makes a reef either rebound or convert to undersea algae fields after a disturbance. “Experimental support for alternative attractors on coral reefs”, Russell J. Schmitt, Sally J. Holbrook, Samantha […]
Changes in seasonal lake ice are threatening the lives of those who depend on it. Find out how scientists are tracking them.
Observing long-term trends in the environment can be a daunting task. Here, scientists used settlement panels to observe community compositional changes in San Francisco Bay (SF Bay). Over a 5-year period, they deployed 500 panels across ten sites in the SF Bay region. An exciting part about this project was the use of citizen scientists […]
Ocean circulation patterns are generally thought to move water from one area to another in the world’s oceans. One example of this includes eddies, swirling water masses that spin off from major ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream off the coast of the eastern U.S. Some of these eddies can bring more productive waters […]
The largest leatherback ever recorded weighed 2,019 pounds, and yet this behemoth lives on a diet composed almost entirely of jelly – gelatinous zooplankton that is. These endangered sea turtles travel up to the Atlantic Canadian coast during the summer in search of a tasty treat. In order to better understand the link between jellyfish […]
With human puberty seemingly beginning earlier and earlier, have you ever wondered what triggered sexual development? Dodd et al., studied just that by examining development in clownfish.
A recent study uses observations from robotic floats to examine phytoplankton blooms in the Southern Ocean. The data show that biological productivity is closely linked to seafloor topography. This is because currents flowing over seamounts cause enhanced mixing that delivers nutrients to the sunlit upper ocean where phytoplankton grow.
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Lights, Camera, Action! Photography as a tool for observing environmental change
Observing long-term trends in the environment can be a daunting task. Here, scientists used settlement panels to observe community compositional changes in San Francisco Bay (SF Bay). Over a 5-year period, they deployed 500 panels across ten sites in the SF Bay region. An exciting part about this project was the use of citizen scientists
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