This colorful coral lives in Australia's Great Barrier Reef, which is rapidly shrinking due to human impacts.
CREDIT:
Publish by: Nancy Knowlton - Oct 2, 2012
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (or the GBR as it is known to reef aficionados) stretches for more than 2,300 kilometers (over 1,429 miles) and can be seen from outer space. This largest barrier reef in the world is both a national icon and a global treasure that was recognized as a World Heritage site over thirty years ago. Yet a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that large portions of the GBR have been on a trajectory of decline for much of this period. Between 1986 and 2012, over half of the living coral has been lost. If current trends...
Tags: Coral bleaching, Corals
A Caribbean hermit crab (Coenobita clypeatus) crawls on the forest floor.
CREDIT:
Flickr user Island Conservation
Publish by: Hannah Waters - Sep 11, 2012
Over the last few days, a video of hermit crabs stampeding across the rocky shores of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands has taken the internet by storm. Where are the hermit crabs going, and why? These hermit crabs are Coenobita clypeatus , the Caribbean hermit crab (also known as the soldier crab), which are native to islands throughout the Caribbean region. I typically think of hermit crabs as a marine phenomenon, but the adults of this species live in wet inland areas, hiding between tree roots or in caves. They mostly eat iguana poop (from Cyclura stejnegeri ), although they can also...
Tags: Crabs, Crustaceans, Migration, Reproduction
When this tusk shell was brought up from a dive it was a surprise when a hermit crab poked out. The large claw that you see can be pulled in to cover the shell opening.
CREDIT:
Barry Brown/Substation Curacao
Publish by: Trish Mace - Aug 22, 2012
Editor's Note: See more information and details about the organisms displayed in the slideshow here . Researchers who come to Curaçao to take part in DROP ( Deep Reef Observation Project ) aren’t running on sleep; they’re running on passion, curiosity and a drive to not waste a moment of opportunity to explore. (And, yes, a fair bit of caffeine.) We are in as much an age of discovery as were Lewis and Clark , Alfred Russel Wallace or Austin Hobart Clark (whose travels on-board the Albatross in 1906 contributed to building NMNH's collections). But our current age of exploration is technology-...
Tags: Smithsonian scientists
The Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structure was developed to help scientists study coral reef diversity and have now been adopted broadly to study diversity around the world.
CREDIT:
Laetitia Plaisance/CReefs, Census of Marine Life
Publish by: Trish Mace - Aug 16, 2012
If there had been room to stand up, there would have been a standing ovation. As it was, the five of us on the submersible Curasub clapped and cheered when the first three deep-reef ARMS (Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures) were successfully deployed at approximately 396 feet (120 meters). ARMS are like condos for a reef’s “hidden biodiversity” -- the small invertebrates and algae that grow, burrow and hide in the cracks and crevices of reefs. In the last few years, more than 500 identical ARMS have been deployed in shallow reefs around the world for a year at a time providing a standard...
Tags: Smithsonian scientists
The Curasub departs for a deep sea dive, up to 1,000 feet off the island of Curaçao, where this sub is located.
CREDIT:
Trish Mace/ Smithsonian Institution
Publish by: Trish Mace - Aug 13, 2012
The Mars rover Curiosity is sending images back home : glimpses of another world during a voyage of discovery. While Curiosity is clicking pictures millions of miles away, I am privileged to be taking part in my own voyage of discovery to the inner space of this planet. Without need of a spacesuit, I am clicking pictures off Curaçao, an island in the Dutch Caribbean. A submersible carries researchers to one of the least explored regions of the ocean: the deep reefs of the twilight zone, which in the clear waters off Curaçao extend to a depth close to 1000 feet. In this shadowy realm,...
Where the pH is the lowest, corals can no longer grow - sand, rubble and seagrasses replace the reef.
CREDIT:
Laetitia Plaisance
Publish by: Laetitia Plaisance - Aug 2, 2012
Scientists don’t often get the opportunity to travel through time. But nestled among the beautiful coral reefs of Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a place that provides a glimpse today of what could be the biggest future threat to coral reef survival: Ocean Acidification . Ocean acidification is occurring because the ocean has absorbed about a third of the carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels . That carbon is changing the chemistry of the ocean, making seawater more acidic. Reef biologists expect this to be a bigger and bigger problem as more and more...
Dive through the zones of the ocean to the deep ocean bottom -- like this remote operated vehicle (ROV) -- where many strange species live, and there are many yet to be discovered. Explore them in the Deep Ocean Exploration section.
Publish by: Dave Pawson - Jul 13, 2012
Imagine: You’re in a small submersible, and you gently settle on the soft muddy bottom at a depth of 12,000 feet. It’s absolutely dark. What will you see when the exterior lights are turned on? Will you discover underwater volcanoes and hydrothermal vents, as some astonished geologists did back in 1977? Not likely, but you will almost certainly see several kinds of animals that are new to science, and there’s a good chance you’ll also see some beer cans. The deep sea – that part of the ocean that is perpetually dark – is 103 million square miles in area. However, despite a dramatic increase...
Corals, sponges and seaweeds cover most of the surface of many coral reefs.
CREDIT:
Wolcott Henry
Publish by: Maggy Hunter Benson - Jul 9, 2012
How do you make science sing? Just ask a couple of female scientists to sing about their research interests and their passion is quickly conveyed in a quirky little tune. Informative, inspiring, and a little bit silly are all adjectives that aptly describe this music video performed and produced by a group of female graduate students from UCLA’s Barber Lab . Set to Billy Joel’s “The Longest Time,” this little ditty does a fabulous job of describing biodiversity of the Coral Triangle and these student’s research and passion for studying it. The video started getting more attention this week as...
Tags: Corals, Ocean art, Scientists at work
Scripps Institution of Oceanography's FLoating Instrument Platform, or FLIP, conducts sea trials off San Diego in May 2009.
CREDIT:
© 2009 Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Publish by: Hannah Waters - Jul 2, 2012
Ships are well-known for their tiny rooms and tight quarters. But have you heard of a sea vessel that has toilets and sinks sticking out of the walls, and staircases and doors on the ceiling? This unique research vessel is real -- and, in June 2012, the Office of Naval Research and Scripps Institution of Oceanography celebrated its 50th birthday. The reason FLIP -- or the FLoating Instrument Platform -- has such bizarre interior design is because all the rooms have to be livable when the vessel is in either of two configurations. In the first configuration, the 355-foot long research platform...
Tags: Research vessels, Senses, Whales
The Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structure was developed to help scientists study coral reef diversity and have now been adopted broadly to study diversity around the world.
CREDIT:
Laetitia Plaisance/CReefs, Census of Marine Life
Publish by: Maggy Hunter Benson - Jun 27, 2012
Collect, sort, identify, photograph, sample, record. Repeat a couple thousand times. This is what the students and researchers have been doing as the Indonesian Biodiversity Research Center (IBRC) project has seriously ramped up. The foundation of the IBRC project is a relatively new method of sampling biodiversity , which uses Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures (ARMS) to measure reef life. Resembling a reef condominium, each ARMS is a stack of 10 spaced plastic plates that are left on the ocean bottom for a specific period of time. Marine invertebrates -- like sea squirts, bryozoans,...
