New research combines cutting-edge engineering with animal behaviour to explain the origins of efficient swimming in nature’s underwater acrobats: seals and sea lions.
Female elephant seals take seven-month feeding trips during which they balance danger, starvation and exhaustion.
Dan Costa
By measuring how and when elephant seals sleep, researchers were able to figure out how elephant seals change their risk-taking behavior as they gain weight.
Jaime Bran/Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
This newly discovered ancient monk seal is challenging previous theories about how and where monachine seals evolved. It’s the biggest breakthrough in seal evolution research in about 70 years.
The only way to learn about the sensory abilities of dolphins is with the help of trained dolphins.
Dolphin Quest
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.
A cruise ship leaves Resolute Bay, Nunavut, in the summer of 2014.
(Silviya V. Ivanova)
The long tusk of the male narwhal earned these whales their fanciful nickname. But there’s more to these Arctic mammals than their unique spiral tooth.
We don’t know for sure which one is smarter, because not everyone agrees on what “intelligence” means. Both have their own special behaviours and skills and we can’t say who is more intelligent.
Protecting forests and wetlands, which absorb and store carbon, is one way to slow climate change. Scientists are proposing similar treatment for marine animals that help store carbon in the oceans.
A pod of narwhals (Monodon monoceros) in central Baffin Bay. Narwhals are the most vulnerable animals to increased ship traffic in the Arctic Ocean.
Kristin Laidre/University of Washington
Climate change is shrinking Arctic sea ice and opening the region to ship traffic. Whales, seals and other marine mammals could be at risk unless nations adopt rules to protect them.
Bottlenose dolphins off the coast of New Jersey.
Artie Kopelman
How can marine preserves best protect sea creatures that move in and out of them? Two ocean scientists describe new thinking about designing marine protected areas.
Bottlenose dolphins, are very coastal and subsist on small fish connected to reefs and smaller bays.
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