Microphones on the seafloor recorded life under the Antarctic ice for two years – inadvertently catching seal trills and chirps that are above the range of human hearing. Could they be for navigation?
Lee Smee, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and Joseph W. Reustle, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Hurricane Harvey destroyed the fishing infrastructure of Aransas Bay and reduced fishing by 80% over the following year. This removed humans from the trophic cascade and whole food webs changed.
Companies are eager to mine the deep ocean for valuable mineral deposits. But scientists are concerned about impacts on sea life, including creatures that haven’t even been discovered yet.
Wild dolphins are fast, smart and hard to study, but it is important to understand how human actions affect their health. So we are building a drone to sample hormones from the blowholes of dolphins.
Microscopic ocean phytoplankton feed a “biological pump” that carries carbon from the surface to deep waters. Scientists have found that this process stores much more carbon than previously thought.
Researchers are using a newly developed satellite tag to study previously unknown aspects of tiger shark reproduction. This approach could be used on other difficult-to-study shark species.
The Deepwater Horizon oil disaster catalyzed a decade of research on oil contamination in the Gulf of Mexico, from surface waters to the seabed, with surprising findings.
Fish can’t read maps, and their eggs and larvae drift across national boundaries. Recent research shows that local problems in one fishery can affect others across wide areas.