Category: Ocean Awareness

Retrieving the passive acoustic mooring to collect the data recordings. Credit: NOAA Fisheries/ Jonny Reid

Listening to the Sounds of the Gulf of Mexico

10/29/2023 - By fisheries.noaa.gov. The acoustics team recovers and deploys a variety of moored underwater recording instruments to provide information on ocean noise, including sounds from human activities, fish, and marine mammals. Long-term sound recordings in the Gulf of Mexico and oceans around the world have been at the forefront of oceanographic… SEE MORE

Rare Good News for Florida’s Bleaching Reefs: Rescued Coral from Miami Spawn

10/28/2023 - By wlrn.org. Scientists racing to save coral from bleaching reefs across the Florida Keys got some rare good news: a handful of coral rescued off Miami spawned in the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel hatchery lab this week. While it’s too soon to know whether they’ll become viable, making babies could definitely be… SEE MORE

Plastic Bottles, Not Bags, Cause the Worst Pollution to Europe's Waterways

Sponging Up Plastic Pollution

10/21/2023 - By Chris Baraniuk. Sponges. Is there anything they can’t do? For millennia, humans have used dried natural sponges to clean up, to paint, and as vessels to consume fluids like water or honey; we’ve even used them as contraceptive devices. Whether synthetic or natural, sponges are great at ensnaring tiny particles in… SEE MORE

One Man’s Quest to Heal the Oceans—And Maybe Save the World

10/20/2023 - By Aryn Baker. Enric Sala—marine ecologist, conservationist, and ocean advocate—is standing under a life-size replica of a Northern Atlantic Right Whale at the natural history museum in Washington, D.C., and the air outside is smudged with wildfire smoke drifting down from Canada. It’s not surprising that Sala wants to talk about the… SEE MORE

How a Little Mussel could Help Save a Merrimack River Salt Marsh

10/17/2023 - By wbur.org. Annalee Tweitmann stood ankle deep in mud, hands wet with mud, peering at a steep riverbank of mud. Mud comes with the job, she said, and she's fine with that. Because mud is where the mussels are. Tweitmann, a coastal restoration ecologist with Mass Audubon, had come to a… SEE MORE

mussel

Правительство Австралии, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Can a Map of the Ocean Floor be Crowdsourced?

10/7/2023 - By bbc.com. Many maps of the ocean floor are decades old. The race is on to properly chart them by 2030 – and crowdsourcing could be part of the answer. Tucked inside a federal government building in the American Rockies is the world's best collection of seafloor maps. Occasionally a… SEE MORE

seafloor

Sculpture, mar, sea, underwater, animal, sea life, undersea | Wallpaper Flare

Underwater Museum of Art: Santa Rosa Beach, Florida

9/24/2023 - By atlasobscura.com. SWIM THROUGH A TUNNEL FORMED by the arched rib-cage remains of a prehistoric marine mammal at the Underwater Museum of Art off the Gulf Coast of Florida. Atlanta-based artist Pat Mclain’s 2023 installation, Cetacean Remains, forms the tunnel and creates a singular interactive diving experience that offers something mysterious, yet rightfully… SEE MORE

underwater

Heron in Louisiana marsh (Photo: AdobeStock)

Louisiana Living Shoreline to Protect Levees, Restore Wetlands, and Reconnect People to the Coast

9/23/2023 - By fisheries.noaa.gov. With $4.5 million dollars in funding from NOAA under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, Jefferson Parish is building the first living shoreline to protect a federal levee system. Standing outside of Mr. Ed’s Seafood & Italian Restaurant—one of the Bucktown, Louisiana, restaurants to come back… SEE MORE

Environment

Green seaweed Turimetta south, Caulerpa filiformis by Wikkicommons

Is Seaweed the Next Big Alternative to Meat?

9/13/2023 - By smithsonianmag.com From kelp burgers to bacon of the sea, sustainable food entrepreneurs are innovating to charm hungry omnivores When vertebrates first heaved themselves out of the sea some 390 million years ago, terrestrial life was good: the atmosphere was rich with oxygen, and competition for food was virtually nonexistent.… SEE MORE

seaweed

Gray whale mother and her calf on their northbound migration.

Gray Whale Calf Count Increases from All-time Low, Positive Sign for the Population

9/12/2023 - By fisheries.noaa.gov. Almost twice as many gray whale calves swam north with their mothers to their Arctic feeding grounds this spring compared to last year, according to a new count completed by NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center. The results suggest that the eastern North Pacific population of gray whales that migrate… SEE MORE

Gray Whales