Category: Blog
-
How the Census of Marine Life got started
Last year saw the climax of a ten-year effort to discover as much as possible about life in the oceans. It was the first census of marine life but it was more than just a very big fish-counting effort. It was an amazingly ambitious endeavor which turned out a menagerie of species new to science,…
-
Another Ocean
We are not alone. Well, we may yet turn out to be alone — in the sense of being (along with whales, primates, and various other earthbound animals) the only sentient living beings in the universe. But our world ocean is evidently not the only one there is. Astronomers have just published a new paper…
-
Octopus Houdini
Octopuses have a gift for squeezing themselves through any hole larger than their beaks. Is this what childbirth is like? [cincopa AUCAPoKGL9ML] This video was filmed by Chance Miller of Miller’s Landing in Seward, Alaska
-
Cuba Journal: Day 8 – Adios
Day 8: Friday 3 June Peace. A gentle breeze coming down the creek between the mangroves and through the corridor of the house, rustling the drying wetsuits over the concrete porch, faint bird and insect songs from the mangroves all around us. A jutilla climbs down out of the trees into the dinghy tied off…
-
Powers of the Cosmic Dusty Seas
Maybe it’s just my love for neon colors that drew me to Christine Nguyen’s wall mural, What the Oceans Left Behind (pictured above, and part of her Powers of the Cosmic Dusty Seas exhibit). But there is something even more captivating about her work – something which operates in that strange territory where art and…
-
Ten questions for Helen Scales
Dr. Helen Scales is a freelance writer, broadcaster and marine biologist based in Cambridge, UK. She earned her doctorate degree from Cambridge University and studied the lives and loves of a fish called the Napoleon wrasse or humphead wrasse, a rare and endangered giant on coral reefs of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Helen usually interviews me,…
-
Emperor penguin takes a wrong turn
This beautiful picture is an emperor penguin that’s pitched up a long way from home. It took a wrong turn and ended up on a beach in New Zealand. It was found by local resident Christine Walker who said: “It was out of this world to see it…
-
Cuba journal: Day 7 – The Wall of Mouths
Day 7: Thursday 2 June Done. All over now but the last dregs of clean-up and packing. Five days in the “Gardens of the Queen”, and what a time it’s been. A journey back in time in both the state of society and of the Sea. In the last five days we’ve become accustomed to…
-
Super tough corals of American Samoa
One of Dr. Steve Palumbi‘s Microdocs videos about his lab’s work with corals from Ofu Island reef in American Samoa that seem highly resistant to thermal stress. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R38NBEQGF_s&[/youtube]
-
Antarctic Oceanography: Then & Now
THEN: …and NOW: These days, the plankton nets are a little larger. There are satellite phones and internet connections. We have GPS technology, hot tubs, and widescreen TVs. And the ships’ hulls are a little more, uh… reinforced? Life on an Antarctic research vessel may be less unpredictable, but it is no less magical in…