The Ocean Blog

Memorial Day is nearly upon us. We thought it'd be a good time to think about our summer beach reads. And yes, we're taking the phrase literally. (A quick aside: As a Minnesota-native I'd argue that winter is an equally good time to embark on an ocean reading list. Especially if the subject matter veers in the tropical direction.) As the Ocean Portal has done in the past, we want to hear about your favorite marine-themed books. Fiction or non-fiction. Short stories or epics. Old or new. We hope you'll share the titles and your thoughts about them in the comments section below. I personally...

Sea stars are important members of marine ecosystems, especially in the tropics. We may think of tropical coral reefs as being home mainly to fish and corals, but in fact these habitats are home to a huge diversity of ecologically important invertebrates. Sometimes, human influences can throw off the balance between these invertebrates, resulting in a cascade effect that negatively affects the entire coral reef ecosystem. A case study of this imbalance can be found in the tropical Indo-Pacific crown-of-thorns sea star (COTS). (Scientific name= Acanthaster planci ) Meet the Crown-of-Thorns Sea...

The blanket octopus can rip a poisonous tentacle from a Portuguese man-o-war and wield it like a sword to ward off enemies as it soars through the ocean trailing its webbed cloak behind it. Vampyroteuthis infernalis , the vampire squid from hell, has been egregiously misnamed. This poor little thing – more like a wallflower or a tumbleweed than a devil from hell – is sometimes reduced to defending itself by biting off its own arm tip. Then the tip floats off, sparkling its blue lights in the darkness and luring away the enemy. The giant Pacific octopus with its eight huge arms can pass a...

When he was 10 years old, Stephen Cairns lived in Cuba where he kept a collection of butterflies and sea shells. When his family moved to Louisiana, he could bring only one of the collections with him. He chose the shells. He says that is when he knew he was going to be a marine biologist. Today, Dr. Cairns is a research zoologist and chair of the Invertebrate Zoology Department at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Recently Dr. Cairns and other scientists teamed up with the Ocean Portal to showcase examples from the marine collections on the “Explore the...