Plankton has a chemical fingerprint that reveals where it came from. Scientists have now used this to track sharks at the opposite end of the food web.
A recent study shows plankton that have adapted to road salt have disrupted circadian rhythms. This finding suggests that environmental pollutants could also affect human circadian clocks.
Great white photobomb.
George T. Probst/NOAA/Flickr
The world’s oceans are home to innumerable life forms, from sponges to sea lions, and scientists have many creative ways of studying them.
Furious winds keep the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Anarctica free of snow and ice. Calcites found in the valleys have revealed the secrets of ancient subglacial volcanoes.
Stuart Rankin/Flickr
Melting ice from Antartica could feed vast plankton blooms, trapping carbon in the ocean. To understand this complex mechanism, researchers looked at volcanoes deep under glaciers.
Watch out, there’s a mixotroph about.
Shutterstock
They ‘engulf living prey, suck out their innards, poison them, harpoon them, make them explode, and steal and reuse body parts’. And we ignore them at our peril.
The Balleny Islands off East Antarctica - one of the many stops along the way.
Krudller/Wikimedia Commons
Why spend three months completing a lap of Antarctica (and probably getting seasick along the way)? It’s the only way to get vital clues about the remote Southern Ocean and its influence on the planet.
Steven Morgan deploys ABLE robots in a swimming pool to test how well their programs simulate larval behavior.
University of California, Davis
Most ocean species start out as larvae drifting with currents. Using underwater robots, scientists have found that larvae use swimming motions to affect their course and reach suitable places to grow.
A bloom of phytoplankton in the Barents Sea: the milky blue colour strongly suggests it contains coccolithopores.
Wikimedia/NASA Earth Observatory
The dust storm that turned Sydney red in 2009 triggered plankton blooms in the Tasman Sea, demonstrating how we might fertilise the ocean to take up more carbon dioxide.
The Southern Ocean is remote, cloudy – and full of plankton.
Liam Quinn
These tiny organisms play a big role in regulating the Earth’s climate.
Phytoplankton are responsible for half the world’s productivity. Here, a phytoplankton bloom in the northern Pacific.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr
You may not have heard of them or given them much thought, but phytoplankton — the microscopic plants that grow throughout the world’s oceans — are the foundation of oceanic food webs. Although tiny, they…
Callum Whyte, Scottish Association for Marine Science
As I was growing up, any time my mother suggested buying mussels or cockles for dinner, my gran would pipe up with the old adage that “you should only be eating shellfish when there’s an ‘R’ in the month…
Hudson Bay Lowlands are staying greener for longer as temperatures rise.
K. Rühland
Lakes of the Hudson Bay Lowlands, in northeast Canada, are showing evidence of abrupt change in one of the last Arctic regions of the world to have experienced global warming, according to Canadian research…
Climate change in the past can tell us much about what is happening today. New research shows how plankton shells dredged from sea floors hold the information we seek. For climate data dating back as far…