Search
In 2005, scientists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) observed a deep-sea squid species (Gonatus onyx) that keeps close watch over her eggs.
Photo

Squid Watching Over Eggs

View Image
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
Photo

Citizen Science With a Drift Card

View Image
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
Photo

Fiddler Crabs In a Gulf Marsh

View Image
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
Photo

Layers of Weathered Oil

View Image
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
Photo

Killifish in the Gulf of Mexico

View Image
Guitarfish, rays, and other bycatch are tossed from a shrimp boat in La Paz, Mexico in 2006.
Photo

Bycatch Raining Down From Above

View Image
Lost nets become entangled on a coral reef in the NW Hawaiian Islands, doing damage for decades. Wave action on the net breaks pieces of coral off until the net breaks, when it is free to catch on new reefs and do more damage.
Photo

Lost Nets Hurt Coral Reefs

View Image
This male dancing fiddler crab (Uca terpsichores) has built a sand “hood” at the entrance to his burrow, which he hopes will attract females to his humble abode—as if that big beautiful claw of his weren't enough!
Photo

The Dancing Fiddler Crab Shows Off

View Image
These zooplankton collected on a research cruise include a jellyfish, a lanternfish, a snipe eel, two large orange shrimp, a fuzzy pyrosome (which is bioluminescent), and several smaller animals.
Photo

Counting the Ocean's Diversity

View Image
Local yarn and craft shops were highly involved in creating the Smithsonian Community Reef—the local community’s accompaniment to the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef exhibit.
Photo

Crochet Coral Reef Community Window Display

View Image
A 3-D reconstruction of the skull of a fin whale fetus.
Photo

3-D Reconstruction Of Fin Whale Skull

View Image