EurekAlert! - Science News: Marine Science Portal

Public Release: 25-Oct-2012

Science
Fishing for answers off Fukushima
Japan's "triple disaster," as it has become known, began on March 11, 2011, and remains unprecedented in its scope and complexity. To understand the lingering effects and potential public health implications of that chain of events, scientists are turning to a diverse and widespread sentinel in the world's ocean: fish.

Public Release: 24-Oct-2012

Nature
Living power cables discovered
A multinational research team has discovered filamentous bacteria that function as living power cables in order to transmit electrons thousands of cell lengths away.

European Research Council, Danish National Research Foundation

Public Release: 24-Oct-2012

Historical Biology
100 million-year-old coelacanth fish discovered in Texas is new species from Cretaceous
A fossil discovered in Texas is a new species of coelacanth fish. Paleontologist John Graf, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, identified the skull as a 100 million-year-old coelacanth, making it the youngest discovered in Texas. The new species, Reidus hilli, brings to 81 the world's coelacanth species, including two alive today. Coelacanth fish have eluded extinction for 400 million years. Reidus hilli belongs to Dipluridae, a new family Graf determined is transitional between Mawsoniidae and Latimeriidae families.

SMU Institute for the Study of Earth and Man

Public Release: 24-Oct-2012

PLOS ONE
Archer fish hunt insects with water jet 6 times stronger than their muscular power
Archer fish knock their insect prey out of overhanging vegetation with a jet of water several times more powerful than the fish's muscles. New research now shows that the fish generate this power externally using water dynamics rather than with any specialized internal organs. The research, published Oct. 24 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Alberto Vailati and colleagues from the University of Milan, provides the first explanation for how archer fish can generate such powerful jets to capture their prey.

Public Release: 23-Oct-2012

eLife
Did bacteria spark evolution of multicellular life?
Choanoflagellates are single-celled plankton and the closest living relatives of animals, including humans. UC Berkeley molecular biologists Nicole King and Rosanna Alegado found that these organisms form colonies only when triggered by previously unknown bacteria. The discovery suggests that early single-celled organisms may originally have come together in the presence of bacteria, perhaps to make more efficient feeding machines that eventually evolved into multicellular life.

National Institutes of Health, Moore Foundation

Public Release: 23-Oct-2012
Helping North America's marine protected areas adapt to a changing climate
The Commission for Environmental Cooperation has published Scientific Guidelines for Designing Resilient Marine Protected Area Networks in a Changing Climate in collaboration with the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea and based on the work of thirty-three of North America's top experts.

Public Release: 23-Oct-2012

Journal of Molecular Ecology
Genetic patterns of deep-sea coral provide insights into evolution of marine life
The ability of deep-sea corals to harbor a broad array of marine life, including commercially important fish species, make these habitat-forming organisms of immediate interest to conservationists, managers, and scientists. Understanding and protecting corals requires knowledge of the historical processes that have shaped their biodiversity and biogeography.

Public Release: 23-Oct-2012
UH professor to lead international drilling expedition
From finding the first deep-water hydrocarbons in the Gulf of Mexico to locating the meteorite impact that doomed the dinosaurs, ocean drilling has unlocked major mysteries. Geoscientists hope to uncover more secrets on an expedition to recover the first-ever drill core from the lower crust of the Pacific Ocean. University of Houston geologist Jonathan Snow will co-lead 28 scientists aboard the JOIDES Resolution research vessel on a voyage supported by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program.

Integrated Ocean Drilling Program

Public Release: 23-Oct-2012

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Oxygen's ups and downs in the early atmosphere and ocean
A team led by geochemists at the University of California, Riverside challenges the simple notion of an up-only trend for early oxygen on Earth, and provides the first compelling direct evidence for a major drop in oxygen after the gas's first rise. This drop, they say, may have ushered in more than a billion years that were marked by a return to low-oxygen concentrations at Earth's surface, including the likelihood of an oxygen-free deep ocean.

NASA/Exobiology Program, National Science Foundation

Public Release: 23-Oct-2012
New guide for compiling national species checklists
The Global Biodiversity Information Facility has published a new guide on policies and procedures to capture information for national species checklists. The Best practice guide for compiling, maintaining and disseminating national species checklists is a tool to help improve the capacity of a country to document, and thus better manage, its biodiversity.

Public Release: 23-Oct-2012

Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Fossil study helps pinpoint extinction risks for ocean animals
What makes some ocean animals more prone to extinction? An analysis of roughly 500 million years of fossil data for marine invertebrates reveals that ocean animals with small ranges have been consistently hard hit, whereas population size has little effect. This means that reductions in range size -- such as when a species' habitat is destroyed or degraded -- could mean a big increase in long-term extinction risk, even when remaining populations are large, the authors say.

US National Science Foundation

Public Release: 22-Oct-2012

Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
Survival of the shyest?
A fish's personality can influence how it responds to, and learns from threats, according to a new study by Professor Grant Brown from Concordia University in Canada and his colleagues. Their work, looking at how personality influences a fish's memory of a predator threat, shows that bold trout forget predator odor, and hence potentially predator threat, quicker than shy trout. The research is published online in Springer's journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

Concordia University, Engineering Research Council of Canada, University of Saskatchewan, NSERC

Public Release: 22-Oct-2012
Leisure boats threaten the Swedish West Coast archipelago
The number of leisure boats along the Swedish West Coast has risen dramatically over the last 20 years, resulting in a risk that the inner archipelago might be destroyed. These are the findings of new research from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Public Release: 22-Oct-2012

Environmental Research Letters
Climate change threatens marine environment in the Baltic Sea
At the end of the 21st century, the temperature in the Baltic Sea will be higher and the salt content lower than at any time since 1850. If no action is taken, there may be major consequences for the marine environment. "This is the first time anyone has taken a detailed look at how climate models and individual factors combine to affect a specific region," says Jonathan Havenhand, researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Public Release: 22-Oct-2012

Coral Reefs
Sweden's only coral reef at risk of dying
Sweden's only remaining cold-water coral reef, the Säcken reef in the Koster Fjord, is under threat of extinction. Because of that, researchers from the University of Gothenburg have started a restoration project where healthy corals from nearby reefs in Norway are being removed and placed on the Säcken reef.

Public Release: 22-Oct-2012

Current Biology
A whale with a distinctly human-like voice
For the first time, researchers have been able to show by acoustic analysis that whales--or at least one very special white whale--can imitate the voices of humans. That's a surprise, because whales typically produce sounds in a manner that is wholly different from humans, say researchers who report their findings in the Oct. 23 issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

Public Release: 21-Oct-2012

Nature
New understanding of Antarctic's weight-loss
Scientists find present sea level rise is happening with apparently very little contribution from Antarctica as a whole.

Natural Environment Research Council

Public Release: 21-Oct-2012

Nature Photonics
How a fish broke a law of physics
Silvery fish such as herring, sardine and sprat are breaking a basic law of physics, according to new research from the University of Bristol published today in Nature Photonics.

Public Release: 19-Oct-2012

Ecology and Evolution
Ancient DNA sheds light on Arctic whale mysteries
Scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society, the American Museum of Natural History, City University of New York, and other organizations have published the first range-wide genetic analysis of the bowhead whale using hundreds of samples from both modern populations and archaeological sites used by indigenous Arctic hunters thousands of years ago.

Public Release: 18-Oct-2012

Geology
From the Alps to the Deep Mantle
Geology articles posted online ahead of print this month survey topography, minerals, faults and tectonics, alluvium, modeling, snowball Earth, fossils and extinction, and pyrite-filled worm burrows. One notable study provides a new eruption date for the Salton Buttes (Calif., USA) of 30,000 years later than that determined by earlier studies, coinciding with the appearance of the earliest known obsidian tools there.

Public Release: 18-Oct-2012

Science
Tropical collapse caused by lethal heat
Almost no life survived in the Early Triassic for 5 million years. Scientists show for the first time that sea-level temperatures in the Tropics reached 40 deg C.

Chinese Science Foundation

Public Release: 17-Oct-2012

Nature
Why are coastal salt marshes falling apart?
Salt marshes have been disintegrating and dying over the past two decades along the US Eastern Seaboard and other highly developed coastlines without anyone fully understanding why.

National Science Foundation

Public Release: 17-Oct-2012

2012 SIAM Annual Meeting
Mathematics and the ocean: Movement, mixing and climate modeling
Emily Shuckburgh of the British Atlantic Survey described mathematical ideas from dynamical systems along with numerical modeling and experimental observations to analyze mixing in the ocean.

Public Release: 17-Oct-2012

Environmental Science and Policy
Coral reefs and food security: Study shows nations at risk
A new study co-authored by the Wildlife Conservation Society identifies countries most vulnerable to declining coral reef fisheries from a food-security perspective while providing a framework to plan for alternative protein sources needed to replace declining fisheries.

Public Release: 17-Oct-2012

Nature Climate Change
Too late to stop global warming by cutting emissions
Governments and institutions should focus on developing adaption policies to address and mitigate against the negative impact of global warming, rather than putting the emphasis on carbon trading and capping greenhouse-gas emissions, argue Johannesburg-based Wits University geoscientist Dr. Jasper Knight and Dr. Stephan Harrison from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.