Traveling Around the World to Study the Future of the Ocean
By Dulce It takes three days of traveling to reach the islands of Papua New Guinea (PNG) from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Laetitia Plaisance , a researcher at...
Up Close and Personal with a Mangrove Root
Kopelman's watercolors focus on the beautiful sponges that attach to mangrove roots. Credit: Irene Kopelman I got a lot of funny looks at the airport when I opened the oversized cooler for the baggage...
Trials and Tribulations with Contamination
My internship at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History started off without a hitch. I was excited to look through the microscope at samples collected from halfway across the world in Papua New...
From Field to Lab: How Carbon Seeps Provide a Chance to See Future Impacts of Ocean Acidification
By Sarah Leinbach Every year, humans spew billions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, like coal, oil and natural gas. The world’s oceans absorb some of it,...
Seagrasses and Light in the Chesapeake Bay
Seagrasses growing on the seafloor of the Chesapeake Bay rely on light to grow—but, thanks to pollution, that sunlight has become more scarce. Nutrient runoff from fertilizers causes microscopic algae (phytoplankton) to grow rapidly...
Searching for Crustaceans in the Deep Sea
In this video Smithsonian research zoologist Dr. Martha Nizinski takes viewers with her as she searches for crustaceans in the deep sea . She's particularly interested in finding squat lobsters , which despite their...
Investigating Nutrient Pollution's Impact on Mangroves
At Carrie Bow Cay in Belize , Dr. Candy Feller explains her research on the effect of excess nutrients on mangrove swamps. Feller runs the Animal-Plant Interaction Lab at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center...
Witness to a Plastic Invasion
The Smithsonian Institution's Dive Officer documents a "swirling monster" of plastic trash that she encountered while diving in Belize. It blew in for two solid days: a flotilla of plastic forks, soda bottles, rubber...
What Lives in the Gulf of Mexico? Exploring Marine Collections on Google Earth
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...
A Plague of Sea Stars
Scientists have been studying why populations of crown-of-thorns sea stars ( Acanthaster planci ) have mushroomed in recent decades. Coral reefs can suffer when the sea star's numbers explode; the echinoderm has a healthy...
A World Adrift: Life in the Sargassum
The open ocean is surprisingly barren to the naked eye. Every now and again you will encounter a school of fish and their attendant predators, but most of the life that you find is...
