Tag: Ocean Awareness

A species of zooplankton called Calanus finmarchicus floats in a sample jar in a laboratory at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute on Sept. 2, 2015. Credit: Gregory Rec/Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)

Peeking into the Ocean’s Microscopic Baby Boom

5/8/2024 - By Kelly Fretwell and Adrienne Mason. The northeast Pacific Ocean is home to an astonishing array of marine creatures—spiky urchins, multiarmed sea stars, soft sea slugs the color of lemons, and barnacles with their heads glued to rocks. Strolling the seashore or diving below the ocean’s surface, we can see the adult… SEE MORE

Transforming Waste Fishing Gear into Profitable Resources

3/28/2024 - By Paul Molyneaux. Discarded fishing gear is a major contributor to ocean pollution. According to Ben Kneppers, who along with David Stover and Kevin Ahearn, co-founded the fishing net recycling company, Bureo, around 600,000 tons of fishing gear ends up in the ocean every year and continues to kill marine life.… SEE MORE

Virginia Lawmakers Move to Protect Commercial Fishermen from Harassment at Sea

3/27/2024 - By Larry Chowning. The Virginia General Assembly has passed HB 928, a bill designed to protect commercial fishermen and their boats from harassment at sea. The measure passed 38-1 by the state Senate and 99-0 in the lower House, and was signed on by legislative leaders in early March. Gov.… SEE MORE

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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

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