News by Subject Agriculture

A study co-led by Duke University reveals shipwrecks off North Carolina's coast are important habitats for sand tiger sharks, whose population plummeted in the 1980 and 1990s. Photos taken months and even years apart by scuba divers show female sand tiger sharks returning to the same shipwrecks. The photos were uploaded to the citizen-science program Spot A Shark USA which used specialized software to ID the sharks.

A pioneering tagging system that monitors the movement and local environment of sea animals reaches deeper depths and higher sensitivities.

The Araguaian river dolphin of Brazil was thought to be solitary with little social structure that would require communication. But researchers from the University of Vermont and the University of St. Andrews have discovered the dolphins actually are social and can make hundreds of different sounds, a finding that could help uncover how communication evolved in marine mammals.

Fish warn each other about danger by releasing chemicals into the water as a signal, research by the University of Saskatchewan (USask) has found.

Research by a team of the world's leading oceanographers has proposed a new explanation for how the ocean absorbs and stores carbon, solving a riddle that has long puzzled scientists. It's well established that carbon in the atmosphere is absorbed by phytoplankton and transported to the ocean floor as the microscopic organisms die and sink by gravity through the water.

A new study into one of the world's oldest types of fish, coelacanth, provides fresh insights into the development of the skull and brain of vertebrates and the evolution of lobe-finned fishes and land animals, as published in Nature.

Oxidants found within living organisms are byproducts of metabolism and are essential to wound-healing and immunity. However, when their concentrations become too high, inflammation and tissue damage can occur. University of Illinois engineers have developed and tested a new drug-delivery system that senses high oxidant levels and responds by administering just the right amount of antioxidant to restore this delicate balance.