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Warming events are increasing in magnitude and severity, threatening many ecosystems worldwide. As global temperatures continue to climb, it also raises uncertainties as to the relationship, prevalence, and spread of parasites and disease. A recent study from the University of Washington explores th...

Let’s turn back the hands of time. Before extinction knocked dinosaurs off their pillar, before the “Great Dying” extinction wiped out 95% of all organisms – we had the Paleozoic Era. During this age in Earth’s history, between 541 million and 252 million years ago, arthropods (animals with exoskele...

As the world warmed from the last ice age, a rise in carbon dioxide levels stalled for nearly 2,000 years. That’s always puzzled scientists, but now they think they know what happened. Evidence of minute amounts of marine life in an ancient Antarctic ice sheet helps explain a longstanding puzz...

Study uses satellites and photographs to fill in important gaps in migratory patterns for one of the world’s largest species of rays. Marine animals are notoriously difficult to track, creating big gaps in how scientists understand their behavior and migration patterns — key insights for helpi...

Cuvierina atlantica, a thecosomatous pteropod with an elongated shell. Credit: David Murphy and coauthors Poetry in motion: Engineers analyze the fluid physics of movement in marine snails. In the world’s oceans, billions of tiny marine snails (a form of plankton) commute daily between surface...

Two researchers from Trinity College Dublin are among a four-strong team of principal investigators spearheading a new €10.4 million project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) to assess the importance of marine life to human societies during the last two millennia, with a focus on underst...

When you think of swimming, you probably imagine pushing through the water—creating backwards thrust that pushes you forward. New research at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) suggests instead that many marine animals actually pull themselves through the water, a phenomenon dubbed “suction thru...

Australian research voyage to investigate how life in the Southern Ocean captures and stores carbon from the atmosphere. A fleet of new-generation, deep-diving ocean robots will be deployed in the Southern Ocean, in a major study of how marine life acts as a handbrake on global warming. The automate...

Marine microalgae-based cellular agriculture is a promising new way to sustainably produce plant-based ‘meat’ and healthy ‘superfoods’ for the future. Researchers at Flinders University’s Centre for Marine Bioproducts Development (CMBD) in Australia are responding to gr...

Scientists First To Quantify Consumption Noises Using Whitespotted Eagle Rays “Shell-crushing” — exactly what it sounds like — is a predatory mode used by numerous marine life from crabs to octopuses to large fishes and mammals when they eat hard-shelled mollusks like clams, oysters and ...

Predator-prey interactions reshaped ocean life, adding a fourth evolutionary phase to the fossil record’s three-fauna model. Evolutionary arms races between marine animals overhauled ocean ecosystems on scales similar to the mass extinctions triggered by global disasters, a new study shows. Scientis...

Illegal Shark Fishing Plagues Indian Ocean Marine Protected Area Thousands of sharks have been illegally caught in a Marine Protected Area (MPA) in the Indian Ocean, new research shows. The MPA was created in 2010 around the Chagos Archipelago, also known as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT)...

New findings from scientists of Bremen will aid in the further development of biogeochemical models that include the marine nitrogen cycle. In the deep waters that underlie the productive zones of the ocean, there is a constant rain of organic material called ‘marine snow.’ Marine snow d...

Researchers say management of the predatory fish is critical to protecting Brazil’s coral reefs and marine biodiversity. Since arriving to the northern Atlantic Ocean less than 30 years ago, lionfish have quickly become one of the most widespread and voracious invasive species, negatively impa...

In Japan’s Kumano Sea, scientists have discovered a scale worm species (E. issunboushi) with the first known case of male dwarfism among the group.  In the Kumano Sea, off the southeast coast of Japan, an evolutionary mystery lay in wait. Researchers collected samples from the muddy sea f...

Salps compete with protists, not krill, altering previous assumptions about their ecological impact and potentially boosting both carbon sequestration and marine food chains. Florida State University researchers have more insight into a strange sea creature found in oceans around the world and what ...

Genetics of Coral-Algal Partnerships May Have Conservation Implications The microscopic algae that live inside and provide nutrients to their reef-building coral hosts may be evolving in tandem with the corals they inhabit, so each partner is fine-tuned to meet one another’s needs. A new study by Pe...

Scientists have confirmed that century-old “yellow cells” in marine animals are photosynthetic algae, reviving Geddes’s genus Philozoon and uncovering their global distribution and climate resilience. In the late 1800s, scientists were stumped by the “yellow cells” they were observing wi...

Researchers from the University of Tsukuba find that ocean warming and acidification are shifting temperate coastal reefs to simple turf-dominated ecosystems. At Shikine Island, Japan, kelp forests and abalone fisheries were once common, but over the last twenty years they have disappeared. Now, res...

A sudden hypoxic event off Panama killed half the coral and reshaped reef ecosystems. Microbes bounced back quickly, but larger organisms suffered longer.  In September of 2017, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution postdoctoral scholar Maggie Johnson was conducting an experiment with a colleagu...

Surveys in Mexico show giant sea bass are more plentiful than believed, challenging their critically endangered status and illustrating how missing data can distort conservation. I was looking at the seafloor, focused on identifying fish species as I normally did when diving off of the California co...

River Discharge and Nutrient Loads Contribute to Size Recently, NOAA-supported scientists announced that this year’s Gulf of Mexico “dead zone”— an area of low to no oxygen that can kill fish and marine life — is approximately 6,334 square miles (16,400 square kilometers), or equivalent to more than...

A sweeping analysis of marine fossils from most of the past half-billion years shows the usual rules of body size evolution change during mass extinctions and their recoveries. The discovery is an early step toward predicting how evolution will play out on the other side of the current extinction cr...

How a Deadly Land Fungus Began Killing Marine Mammals in the Salish Sea In the early 2000s, a fungus infected hundreds of animals and people in British Columbia and Washington State. Scientists found that the disease also killed porpoises and dolphins in the Salish Sea–perhaps affecting cetaceans ev...