Think of an aquatic habitat as far away from the deep-sea as you can get without coming up on land, and we will find a connection to the deep-sea. River rock = settlement substrate. Kelp forest = urchin food. Beaches = spawning grounds for tuna food. Mangroves = seafood … food. Bumper stickers in the Carolinas say it best – “no wetlands, no seafood.”
Admittedly, before reading the actual paper I was a little uneasy about the latest paper in PNAS by Goldberg et al. The paper describes a…
Basking sharks are heavily exploited from the shark–finning industry. The damage is compounded by the fact we know so little about their distribution in the…
Dr. Maria Pia Miglietta, a postdoc in my lab at Penn State, just published a fascinating paper on a “silent invasion” happening around the world’s…
Spring is in the air! Its the time of year to release your gametes into the water and make baby barnacles. But wait a second,…
Beware when you go on tropical holiday. Species richness of bacteria is higher in those waters. For many organisms on land (birds, mammals, snails, plants,…
When a scientist is writing a scientific paper we look for that one quintessential figure that tells the whole story. Other figures are ancillary to…
Researchers have been very concerned about the paucity of females of Vulcanoctopus hydrothermalis, an octopus inhabiting the hydrothermal vent community of the Eastern Pacific Rise.…
A species of holothurian, Pannychia, swarms a whale fecal mound in the abyssal Pacific. When Miriam visited me last week at MBARI, we discussed over…
Sometimes we just need a little help to get by in life. A nudge, some encouragement or a simple pat on the back will suffice.…