Go check out these incredible photographs by National Geographic photographer Thomas Peschak of mantaray feeding frenzies in the Maldives. Apparently this swirling ‘cyclone‘ feeding behavior is rarely seen outside of the Maldives. Click here for a previous post on Climate Shifts for more details and video [...]
The Algalita Marine Research Foundation is on a 2 month voyage across the Pacific to study the concentration of plastics in the North Subtropical Gyre. This area has been known as the “Pacific Garbage Patch” due to the convergence of several ocean currents that drag garbage from all corners of the [...]
If we don’t know our history, then we can’t know our future. Historians arguing the relevance of their subject often repeat that mantra. But one group of researchers is showing how true it is. Members of the History of Marine Animals Project (HMAP) believe that scrutinizing the minutiae of historical documents is the key to protecting our oceans for generations to come.
The paradigm of ‘coral vs algae’ has become entrenched in coral reef science over the last few decades. The classic example of this paradigm in the Caribbean was from a paper published byTerry Hughes in a 1994 article in the journal Nature, entitled “Catastrophes, Phase Shifts and Large-Scale Degradation of a Caribbean Coral Reef”. The [...]
A recent study published by Tom Oliver and Stephen Palumbi from Stanford University in the journal ‘Marine Ecology Progress Series‘ seems to suggest yet another miraculous and novel mechanism by which corals will ‘escape’ the pressures of global warming. In a nutshell, the researchers found that corals from ‘warm [...]
The megamouth shark (Megachasma pelagios) is one of the worlds rarest sharks – spotted only 43 times since its discovery back in 1976 off Oahu, Hawaii. These sharks are huge and bizzare creatures, capable of growing upwards of 5m in length, with luminescent light organs surrounding [...]
It’s 2099, and across south-east Asia, a hundred million people are on the march, looking for food. The fish they once relied on is gone.
Communities are breaking down; economies destroyed. That is what we can expect, says the new WWF report, if the world’s richest coral reef is destroyed. And that, it says, could happen this century.
It’s billed as a worst-case scenario, but the report’s chief author, Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, says it is not as bad as the future we’re currently headed towards.
ScienceDaily, 23rd April 2009
The Wildlife Conservation Society announced today a study showing that some coral reefs off East Africa are unusually resilient to climate change due to improved fisheries management and a combination of geophysical factors. WCS announced the results of the study at the International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI), [...]
I remember seeing a fascinating presentation by Mahmood Riyaz on the reef slope failure of this coral reef at the ICRS conference in Florida last year – how the atoll rim was cracking due to the sheer amount of construction and concrete. Welcome to Male, the capital of [...]
One of my PhD Students, Siham Afatta, has started a new science blog called ‘Laut & Kita’ (Sea & Us). Siham (a seasoned blogger) is targeting this as one of very few scientific blogs written in Bahasa (the official language of Indonesia), which focuses primarily on marine [...]
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