All posts tagged: marine biology

Deep-ocean cameras capture first-ever images of live Goblin shark

Deep-ocean cameras capture first-ever images of live Goblin shark

Published by Jenni Sidey

Goblin sharks have spent years in public imagination as something half-seen, half-legendary, a pale, long-snouted predator usually known from carcasses, fishing lines, and brief encounters near death. Now they have finally been seen alive where they actually live, deep in the ocean. As a result, that changes more than a shark checklist. A University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa-led team has reported the first published live observations of goblin sharks, Mitsukurina owstoni, in their natural deep-sea habitat. The paper, published in the Journal of Fish Biology, describes two separate sightings. One was near Jarvis Island in 2019, and another was on the slope of the Tonga Trench in 2024. For a species often called a “living fossil,” the footage fills in a major blank. Goblin sharks are the only living members of their family, a shark lineage dating back nearly 125 million years. Lead author Aaron Judah, a doctoral candidate in the Deep-Sea Fish Ecology Lab and the Deep-Sea Animal Research Center in the Department of Oceanography at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, said the …

Millions of fossil whale bones found in deep-ocean ‘necropolis’

Millions of fossil whale bones found in deep-ocean ‘necropolis’

Published by skeptic

Fossils including possible baleen-whale ribs found at a depth of 5656 metres in the Indian Ocean Global TREnD, IDSSE The world’s deepest known whale graveyard has been discovered in the southern Indian Ocean at a depth of 7 kilometres. The remains found there include a new species of extinct beaked whale and other fossils that are over 5 million years old. In early 2023, Peng Zhou at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his colleagues undertook 32 dives in a crewed submersible along 1200 kilometres of the seafloor, in an area known as the Diamantina Zone. The expedition was part of the Global Hadal Exploration Programme, an effort led by Chinese scientists to explore all the deepest parts of the planet’s oceans, which range from 6000 to 11,000 metres below the surface. At these depths there is no light, and life must survive on what falls from the surface or generate its own energy from chemicals – known as chemosynthesis. The first fossil whales were found at a depth of 7002 metres in a part …

First test of CO2 removal with green sand finds no harm to marine life

First test of CO2 removal with green sand finds no harm to marine life

Published by skeptic

A beach in Southampton, New York, treated with olivine sand Chayenne Moreau The first trial to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide by adding crushed olivine to the ocean had no adverse effects on the seafloor ecosystem in its first year. While the results of the trial in New York state are promising for this carbon-removal technique, researcherss warn they may not have captured all potential negative impacts. The addition of olivine to the ocean should still be carefully regulated, “but there might be ways that it could work and have a minimal effect”, says Emilia Jankowska at the non-profit group Hourglass Climate, who led the study. The United Nations climate body has said the world will need carbon removal methods, which range from planting trees to filtering out CO2 from the air with giant machines, to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. As emissions continue to rise and the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels slips out of reach, many hope these technologies could someday help cool the planet back down. Olivine, or …

Coral reefs on a remote archipelago shrugged off a massive heatwave

Coral reefs on a remote archipelago shrugged off a massive heatwave

Published by skeptic

The Houtman Abrolhos Islands, off Western Australia, where corals appear to be exceptionally heat-tolerant Bill Bachman/Alamy Coral reefs on a chain of islands off Western Australia were almost untouched by a prolonged heatwave that devastated corals in other regions in early 2025. Researchers hope that learning the secret of extreme heat tolerance in these corals will help to protect reefs across the globe, which are in danger of being wiped out by global warming. Kate Quigley at the University of Western Australia in Perth and her colleagues dived at 11 sites across the Houtman Abrolhos archipelago in July 2025. Further north at the Ningaloo Reef, up to 60 per cent of corals died during the same heatwave. This was a story repeated at reefs around the world, with marine heatwaves in 2025 killing vast swathes of coral globally. But at Houtman Abrolhos, apart from a few tiny patches, there weren’t even any signs of stress, such as fluorescing coral. “We expected to see mass bleaching with lots of white colonies, and likely mortality of reefs, given …

Giant octopuses were the ocean’s apex predators 100 million years ago

Giant octopuses were the ocean’s apex predators 100 million years ago

Published by Jenni Sidey

A jaw tip worn down by nearly a tenth does not sound like much until you picture what it means. Chipping, cracking, scratches and polish do not appear on their own. Something was hitting back. That is the clue driving a striking new view of early octopus history. Fossil jaws from the Late Cretaceous suggest that some of the earliest known octopuses were not modest, lurking hunters. They were enormous predators, active enough and strong enough to sit near the top of the marine food web, sharing that space with the great vertebrate hunters of their time. The work, led by researchers at Hokkaido University, centers on an awkward problem in octopus evolution. Octopuses are soft-bodied, which means their bodies rarely survive in the fossil record. Bones and shells tell long, readable stories. Octopuses mostly do not. So the team turned to the part most likely to last: the jaws. Convergent evolution among marine top predators in the Paleozoic–Mesozoic. (CREDIT: Science) A fossil record hidden inside stone Using high-resolution grinding tomography and an artificial intelligence …

Sperm whale clicks contain vowel-like patterns similar to human speech

Sperm whale clicks contain vowel-like patterns similar to human speech

Published by Jenni Sidey

The sound is sharp, spare and strange, a burst of clicks cutting through seawater. For years, researchers treated those sperm whale signals mostly as timing patterns, measuring pauses and rhythms the way someone might study Morse code. But a new analysis suggests there is more going on inside those clicks than timing alone. Some of the animals’ codas, the short click sequences sperm whales use to communicate, appear to contain something like vowel structure. Not human language, and not proof that whales are “talking” in the way people do, but a communication system with features that look surprisingly close to human phonology. That is what makes the new work stand out. It does not claim to have decoded whale meaning. Instead, it points to structure, and a lot of it. Researchers working with Project CETI and the University of California, Berkeley analyzed thousands of sperm whale recordings and found that these codas fall into two distinct acoustic categories. The team describes them as a-vowels and i-vowels because they resemble broad differences seen in human vowel …

Bite mechanics of ancient marine predators yields surprising results

Bite mechanics of ancient marine predators yields surprising results

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Western Interior Seaway, which existed roughly 80 million years ago, split North America into North and South. It was a warm, shallow sea teeming with life from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Fish, squid, and marine reptiles—the lizards that hunted them—inhabited this bountiful marine desert. Some of these predators included large-bodied, or sometimes giant-sized, mosasaurs. These semi-aquatic reptiles re-evolved to live in the ocean, along with long-necked polycotylids. To date, how did so many large predators exist and thrive in the same aquatic space without exhausting their food supply? This has been the focus of an international research collaboration, yet only now is there a comprehensive biomechanical answer based on recent 3D scanning, engineering simulation, and experimentation. The results provide clear evidence of the biomechanical differences between mosasaurs and polycotylids. These distinct physiological configurations represent distinct ecologies and prey types rather than direct competitors. Bite performance of North American mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, showing the bite performance as optimal (bright colors) or suboptimal (darker colors). (CREDIT: Université de Liège / F.Della Giustina) …

A rare sperm whale birth captured how families rally around a newborn

A rare sperm whale birth captured how families rally around a newborn

Published by Jenni Sidey

Eleven sperm whales gathered near the surface off the coast of Dominica on the morning of July 8, 2023, and stayed there for hours. That alone was unusual. What researchers watching from a drone above them were about to record had never been documented in such detail in any cetacean. What unfolded over the next several hours, captured on aerial video and underwater audio, has now been published across two separate papers: one in Science, one in Nature’s Scientific Reports, both produced by Project CETI, the Cetacean Translation Initiative. Together they provide the most complete account of a sperm whale birth ever recorded, and the first quantitative evidence that non-primate animals cooperate during birth in ways that parallel some of the most sophisticated social behaviors observed in humans. A Family That Normally Keeps Its Distance The whales gathered that morning belonged to a social unit researchers call Unit A, a group that has been followed and documented since 2005 by Shane Gero, the Biology Lead for Project CETI and founder of the Dominica Sperm Whale …

First glimpse of sperm whale birth reveals teamwork to support newborn

First glimpse of sperm whale birth reveals teamwork to support newborn

Published by skeptic

Female sperm whales hold the newborn calf above water until it can swim on its own Project CETI A sperm whale giving birth has been assisted by 10 other females in her social unit – the first time such an event has ever been observed in non-primates. In July 2023, scientists who have been monitoring a group of sperm whales in the Caribbean since 2005 noticed that all 11 females in the group had gathered near the surface. By chance, the researchers had drones in the air and were able to observe and record the event. Shortly afterwards, the flukes of a calf started emerging from its mother. The delivery took place over the next half hour, during which the other females coordinated themselves into a highly synchronised formation to protect the mother and newborn. As soon as the calf was born, the female whales gathered around and took turns making sure that it was kept lifted at the surface so it could breathe and had time for its flukes to fully unfurl. In the …