Category: Ocean Awareness

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Why Is the Sea So Hot?

3/21/2024 - By Elizabeth Kolbert. In early 2023, climate scientists—and anyone else paying attention to the data—started to notice something strange. At the beginning of March, sea-surface temperatures began to rise. By April, they’d set a new record: the average temperature at the surface of the world’s oceans, excluding those at the… SEE MORE

North Atlantic right whale Pediddle (#1012) and calf. This species was hunted nearly to extinction by commercial whalers in the 1800s, and continues to face threats from vessel strikes and entanglement in fishing gear. Credit: NOAA Fisheries

Whales and Carbon Sequestration: Can Whales Store Carbon?

3/18/2024 - By fisheries.noaa.gov. The ocean captures about 31 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions, removing carbon from the atmosphere that would otherwise continue to trap heat and increase temperatures. Blue carbon, or carbon captured by ocean ecosystems includes: Carbon absorbed by aquatic plants, algae, and phytoplankton Carbon stored in the bodies of living animals… SEE MORE

Scuba diving unlocks the depths of the ocean © kittisun kittayacharoenpong / Getty Images

Meet the Divers Trying to Figure Out How Deep Humans Can Go

3/1/2024 - By Samantha Schuyler. Two hundred thirty meters into one of the deepest underwater caves on Earth, Richard “Harry” Harris knew that not far ahead of him was a 15-meter drop leading to a place no human being had seen before. Getting there had taken two helicopters, three weeks of test… SEE MORE

Scientists Discover The Anatomy Behind The Songs of Baleen Whales

2/27/2024 - By Will Dunham. WASHINGTON, Feb 21 (Reuters) - It is one of Earth's most haunting sounds - the "singing" of baleen whales like the humpback, heard over vast distances in the watery realm. Now scientists have finally figured out how these filter-feeding marine mammals do it. Baleen whales - a group that includes the… SEE MORE

Best Practices to Release Reef Fish

1/12/2024 - By Sam Hudson Prized bottomfish such as red snapper, gag grouper and other demersal species are experiencing overfishing. That’s according to state and federal fisheries managers in charge of overseeing fish populations. What that means for recreational anglers in the last decade is often shorter seasons, plus the likelihood of early seasonal closures. As you… SEE MORE

Filamentous brown alga growing on Fucus vesiculosus

From urchin crushing to lab-grown kelp, efforts to save California’s kelp forests show promise

12/29/2023 - By apnews.com. CASPAR BEACH, Calif. (AP) — A welding hammer strapped to her wrist, Joy Hollenback slipped on blue fins and swam into the churning, chilly Pacific surf one fall morning to do her part to save Northern California’s vanishing kelp forests. Hollenback floated on the swaying surface to regulate… SEE MORE

Kelp

Robotics ‘Revives’ a Long-Extinct Starfish Ancestor

12/28/2023 - By scientificamerican.com. Engineers and paleontologists teamed up to reconstruct an ancestor of starfish from the Paleozoic era and figure out how it moved Despite incredible advances in modern genomic research, science is nowhere near being able to clone long-extinct animals like the fictional ones in Jurassic Park. Even relatively recent… SEE MORE

starfish

File:Oysters Delicacy Food.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Oysters: Unsung Climate Heroes for your Holiday Buffet

12/27/2023 - By Rochelle Baker. There are moments when Steve Pocock questions the wisdom of his chosen profession as a shellfish farmer. Picking oysters off a beach in the dead of night during a low winter tide, then navigating whiteout conditions to get a loaded vessel home to port, while freezing and… SEE MORE

File:Great White Shark (Carcharodon carcharias) attacking a fish lure ... (30354497085).jpg - Wikimedia Commons

At Sharkathon, Shark Fishers Are a Keen Audience for Conservation Advice

12/24/2023 - By Claudia Geib. Catch-and-release fishing can kill sharks. But fishers will work to limit the damage—once they know how.Every fall, more than 900 recreational anglers in Texas gather their gear and wade into the blood-warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico for Sharkathon. In this four-day catch-and-release shark fishing tournament,… SEE MORE

Shark

Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund | NOAA Fisheries

Biden-Harris Administration Makes $106 Million Available for Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund as Part of Investing In America Agenda

12/23/2023 - By ecomagazine.com. The Department of Commerce and NOAA are announcing the availability of up to $106 million in funding through the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund (PCSRF) for Pacific salmon and steelhead recovery and conservation projects. This funding—which includes funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and Inflation Reduction Act… SEE MORE