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Sea squire illustrations from Ernst Haeckel.

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Sea Squirts

June 2015

Starfish—marine invertebrates of the phylum Echinodermata—are famous for their ability to shed limbs as a means of defense and then regenerate the sacrificed part.

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Haeckel Starfish

June 2015

Citizen Science Tracks Oil’s Path: When oil spills into seawater, it's hard to know where ocean currents will carry it. To map Gulf currents and improve predictions, scientists with GoMRI's GISR project are dropping biodegradable yellow driftcards throug

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Citizen Science With a Drift Card

January 2015

Gulf Marsh Animals Bounce Back But Monitoring Continues: One of the biggest questions is how Gulf animals will fare in the years after the spill, since oil spill impacts don't often happen immediately. One group of GoMRI researchers studied salt marsh anim

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Fiddler Crabs In a Gulf Marsh

January 2015

Follow the Fingerprint: There are many sources of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, including natural deep-sea oil seeps, small spills from ships, and oil from roads that washes into the sea—not to mention big oil spills like Deepwater Horizon. How do GoMRI res

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Layers of Weathered Oil

January 2015

A Tiny Fish Tells A Big Story: Some fish only spend a part of the year in the Gulf of Mexico, but some, like the Gulf killifish, live there year-round. In addition, these estuary fish are small and abundant, making them an excellent study species for scien

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Killifish in the Gulf of Mexico

January 2015

Monk seal pup

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A Mediterranean Monk Seal Pup

April 2016

Illustration of colorful nudibranchs from Ernst Haeckel.

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Nudibranchs

June 2015

A Northern Gannet (Morus bassanus), a species with a normal range in the North Atlantic, interacting with the native Brandt’s cormorants (Phalacrocorax penicillatus) sighted on the Farallon Islands, located off the coast of San Francisco, California in t

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Northern Gannet in the Pacific

November 2015

Illustrations of radiolarians from Ernst Haeckel.

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Radiolarians

June 2015

Haeckel discovered a species of rhizostome jellyfish in Bellagemma, Ceylon, in December 1881. Its form so impressed him that he used it as a model for ceiling decorations in his Villa Medusa home in Jena.

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Rhizostome Jellyfish

June 2015

Sand dollars (like those pictured in this set of illustrations) are flattened, burrowing sea urchins. Dead, sunlight-bleached specimens resemble silver coins, hence their common name. These figures portray a sand dollar’s lifecycle from larva to adult.

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Sea Urchins

June 2015