Marine

Sequencing of marine bacterium will help study of cell communication

The opportunity to annotate the genome of the glow-in-the-dark bacterium, Vibrio fischeri, which lives in symbiotic harmony within the light organ of the bobtail squid, has helped a Virginia Tech microbiologist advance her research on quorum sensing, or how cells communicate and function as a community. Researchers studying the newly sequenced genome of the marine bacterium V. fischeri, d...

Solutions that reduce death of marine life reeled in by International Smart Gear Competition

As the world prepared to observe Earth Day, World Wildlife Fund and its partners in the International Smart Gear Competition announced three new winning solutions to prevent the accidental maiming and killing of marine mammals, juvenile fish, and sea turtles that become ensnared by fishing nets and longlines--a problem known as bycatch--while also improving the efficiency of commercial fishing.</...

Marine sponge yields nanoscale secrets

The simple marine sponge is inspiring cutting-edge research in the design of new materials at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A report about these exciting new results involving the use of gold nanoparticles is the cover story of the current issue of the scientific journal, Advanced Materials. The article is written by Daniel E. Morse, professor of molecular, cellular and dev...

UN environmental agency steps up battle against marine pollution

Coastal pollution, including plastic waste, discarded lead-acid batteries and used oils and lubricants, will come under renewed attack under a new agreement signed by the United Nations environmental agency and an international treaty body controlling hazardous wastes. The Memorandum of Understanding, signed last week in Nairobi, Kenya, by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Regional Seas Program...

Evidence of 600-million-year old fungi-algae symbiosis discovered in marine fossils

Researchers from China and the United States have found evidence of lichen-like symbiosis in 600-million-year-old fossils from South China. The previous earliest evidence of lichen was 400 million years old, discovered in Scotland. The discovery also adds to the scarce fossil record of fungi and raises new questions about lichen evolution. Xunlai Yuan, a paleontologist with the Nanjing Ins...

Census of Marine Life explorers surprised by diversity, density of Arctic creatures

A historic expedition of Census of Marine Life explorers to the planet's most northern reaches has revealed a surprising density and diversity of Arctic Ocean creatures, some believed new to science. Sheltered for millennia under a lid of ice currently one to 20 meters thick, unexpectedly high numbers and varieties of large Arctic jellies, squid, cod, and other animals have been found thri...

Deep thinking: Scientists sequence a cold-loving marine microbe

At home in the deep, dark Arctic Ocean, the marine bacterium Colwellia psychrerythraea 34H keeps very cool--typically below 5° degrees Celsius. How does the bacterium function in this frigid environment? To find out, scientists at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and collaborators have sequenced and analyzed C. psychrerythraea's genome. That genome analysis, posted in the Proceedi...

UNC computer, marine scientists collaborate to predict flow of toxic waters from Katrina

In the immediate wake of Hurricane Katrina, scientists and research centers from across the country came together to generate information on the contaminated floodwaters and offer it to hazardous materials experts and public health officials. In a matter of hours, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Marine Sciences Program and Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), together...

Structures of marine toxins provide insight into their effectiveness as cancer drugs

Vibrantly colored creatures from the depths of the South Pacific Ocean harbor toxins that potentially can act as powerful anti-cancer drugs, according to research findings from University of Wisconsin-Madison biochemists and their Italian colleagues. The research team has defined the structure of the toxins and provided a basic understanding that can be used to synthesize pharmaceuticals,...

Marine bacterium suspected to play role in global carbon and nitrogen cycles

Scientists successfully grow 'dwarf belonging to the sea' in laboratoryScientists are now revisiting, and perhaps revising, their thinking about how Archaea, an ancient kingdom of single-celled microorganisms, are involved in maintaining the global balance of nitrogen and carbon. Researchers have discovered the first Archaea known to oxidize ammonia for energy and metabolize carbon dioxide by su...

UF study first to quantify validity of DNA I.D. tool using marine snails

A trendy holiday gift within a decade may be a hand-held device that instantly identifies any species from a snippet of animal tissue, says a University of Florida researcher. That may be possible thanks to scientific advances that include the first test quantifying the effectiveness of a DNA identification tool among brightly colored shells. With an error rate as low as 4 percent, two UF...

Prenatal exposure to marine toxin causes lasting damage

Duke University Medical Center researchers have found that the naturally occurring marine toxin domoic acid can cause subtle but lasting cognitive damage in rats exposed to the chemical before birth. Humans can become poisoned by the potentially lethal, algal toxin after eating contaminated shellfish. The researchers saw behavioral effects of the toxin in animals after prenatal exposure t...

Restaurant seafood prices since 1850s help plot marine harvests through history

Seafood prices collected from U.S. restaurant menus dating to the 1850s will help plot the shifting harvest of marine species, according to a study to be announced at Oceans Past a Census of Marine Life conference in Denmark on the History of Marine Animal Populations. Led by paleo-oceanographer Glenn Jones at Texas A&M University at Galveston, researchers are charting over 150 years o...

Marine conservation organizations team up to conduct Indonesia coral reefs assessment

Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Reef Check and World Conservation Union to examine damage to tsunami-affected coral reefs; mission set to start next week Three leading marine conservation organizations will complete an extensive survey next week along the west coast of Aceh Province, Indonesia, to determine the impact of last year's devastating earthquake and tsunami on the re...

Compound from marine bacteria shows potential as multiple myeloma therapy

An anti-cancer compound derived from bacteria dwelling in ocean-bottom sediments appears in laboratory tests to be a potent killer of drug-resistant multiple myeloma cells, and potentially with less toxicity than current treatments, report Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers in the November issue of Cancer Cell. The experimental compound, NPI-0052, has been found to block or inhibit c...

Marine mammals are on the frontline of failing ocean health

Leading scientists, physicians, and veterinarians are uncovering new links between land-based pollution and diseases in marine mammals, with implications for human health. "Marine mammals are providing early clues of our unseen impact on the sea," says Paul Sandifer, Chief Scientist for the new Oceans and Human Health Initiative in the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NO...

High-tech tags on marine animals yield valuable data for biologists and oceanographers

Researchers are enlisting seals, sea lions, tunas, and sharks to serve as ocean sensors, outfitting these top predators with electronic tags that gather detailed reports on oceanographic conditions and, in many cases, transmit the data via satellite. The data are proving useful to both biologists and oceanographers, yielding new information about the migrations and behavior of the animals and abo...

Expedition discovers marine treasures

An underwater mountain that forms the world's third-largest atoll has some of the richest diversity of marine life ever found in the Caribbean, according to scientists who recently explored the area. The two-week expedition in January encountered new species of fish, seaweed and other ocean life at little-studied Saba Bank Atoll, a coral-crowned seamount 250 kilometers southeast of Puerto...

UC San Diego partners with Venter Institute to build marine microbial genomics cyberinfrastructure

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) will build a state-of-the-art computational resource and develop software tools to decipher the genetic code of communities of microbial life in the world's oceans. The new resource will help scientists understand how microbes function in their natural ecosystems, enable studies on the effect humans are having on the environmen...

How marine reserves are giving coral reefs a helping hand

It may be no surprise that marine reserves protect the fish that live in them, but now scientists from the University of Exeter have shown for the first time that they could also help improve the health of coral reefs. In a paper in the prestigious journal Science, Dr Peter Mumby and colleagues looked at how a marine park in the Bahamas was affected by the return of the reef's top predator...

The diversity of marine life in the Gulf of Maine region is much greater than previously thought

The Gulf of Maine Program of the Census of Marine Life, with the Huntsman Marine Science Center of St. Andrews, New Brunswick, announced today the first count of known marine species in the Gulf of Maine region -- more than 50% larger than previous estimates. The count is 3,317 species and includes both year-round species and those that migrate to the region seasonally. The Canadian-US...

Marine 'dead zone' off Oregon is spreading

A hypoxic "dead zone" has formed off the Oregon Coast for the fifth time in five years, according to researchers at Oregon State University. This year for the first time, the effect of the l...

On the track of tiny larvae, a new model elucidates connections in marine ecology

A computer model newly developed by researchers combines ocean current simulations and genetic forecasting to help scientists predict animal dispersion patterns and details of the ecology of coral reefs across the Caribbean Sea. The work is reported by Heather M. Galindo and Stephen R. Palumbi of Stanford University, and Donald B. Olson of the University of Miami, and appears in the August 22nd i...

New research finds surveys of larval-stage organisms effective for measuring marine biodiversity

There is a push to document the biodiversity of the world within 25 years. However, the magnitude of this challenge is not well known, especially when it comes to vast and often inaccessible marine environments. To date, surveys of species diversity in the world's oceans have focused on adult organisms, but new research from Boston University has found that studying marine life in its larval phas...

Report warns about carbon dioxide threats to marine life

Worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning are dramatically altering ocean chemistry and threatening marine organisms, including corals, that secrete skeletal structures and support oceanic biodiversity. A landmark report released today summarizes the known effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide on these organisms, known as marine calcifiers, and recommends future res...

Ocean temperature predicts spread of marine species

Scientists can predict how the distance marine larvae travel varies with ocean temperature ?a key component in conservation and management of fish, shellfish and other marine species ?according to a new study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Most marine life, including commercially important species, reproduces via larvae that drift far along ocean currents before retu...

Scientist's persistence sheds light on marine science riddle

When he started compiling an online database of seashells 15 years ago, Dr. Gary Rosenberg did not envision that his meticulous record-keeping would eventually shed light on a 40-year-old evolutionary debate. The debate involves the mechanism underlying the island rule: that small animals isolated on islands evolve to be larger than their mainland relatives, and large animals evolve to be...

Overfishing large sharks impacts entire marine ecosystem, shrinks shellfish supply

Fewer big sharks in the oceans mean that bay scallops and other shellfish may be harder to find at the market, according to an article in the March 30 issue of the journal Science, tying two unlikely links in the food web to the same fate. A team of Canadian and American ecologists, led by world-renowned fisheries biologist Ransom Myers at Dalhousie University, has found that overfishing...

US conservation efforts bring more marine turtles to UK

US and Mexican conservation efforts may have boosted the number of marine turtles visiting UK waters, according to University of Exeter biologists. New research by the University of Exeter and Marine Environmental Monitoring, published this week in Marine Biology (3 May 2007), analyses 100 years of data. It shows an increase in the number of loggerhead and Kemp’s ridley turtles in UK and...

Biologically inspired sensors can augment sonar, vision system in submarines

To find prey and avoid being preyed upon, fish rely on a row of specialized sensory organs along the sides of their bodies, called the lateral line. Now, a research team led by Chang Liu at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has built an artificial lateral line that can provide the same functions in underwater vehicles. "Our development of an artificial lateral line is aimed at...

Darwin's famous finches and Venter's marine microbes

Although the Galápagos finches were to play a pivotal role in the inception of Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection, he had no inkling of their significance when he collected them during his voyage on the HMS Beagle. Similarly, it is hard to predict the impact the vast amount of marine microbial DNA ?collected during the Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition by J....

Smithsonian scientists discover new marine species in eastern Pacific

Smithsonian scientists have discovered a biodiversity bounty in the Eastern Pacific—approximately 50 percent of the organisms found in some groups are new to science. The research team spent 11 days in the Eastern Pacific, a unique, understudied region off the coast of Panama. Coordinated by Rachel Collin of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, a team of Smithsonian scientists an...

Study warns deep-sea mining may pose serious threat to fragile marine ecosystems

Undersea habitats supporting rare and potentially valuable organisms are at risk from seafloor mining scheduled to begin within this decade, says a new study led by a University of Toronto Mississauga geologist. Mining of massive sulphide deposits near "black smokers"—undersea hydrothermal vent systems that spew 350-degree Celsius water into the frigid deep-sea environment, and support su...

Marine phytoplankton changes form to protect itself from different predators

In a paper published June 11 in the online version of Proceedings...