Coastal mega-cities expose ocean wildlife and habitats to “relentless” boat traffic, new research shows.

A new study published in The American Naturalist links grazing halo patterns in coral reefs, as well as those in other patchy habitats, to the spatial patterns of the shelter habitat itself. The researchers found that grazing halos are distinct when the coral is clustered but merge into each other when the coral is dispersed. According to the lead author, "...gaining a better understanding of how halo patterns reflect reef community dynamics may be useful in reef conservation efforts."

Some red algae exhibit structural color that gives their growth tips a blue hue and the rest of their bodies including their fruiting structures a white hue. Moreover, since the color-producing structures are located together with anti-herbivory chemicals, the Kobe University discovery is the first to suggest that red algae use colors for inter-species communication.

Endemic to China’s Yangtze River, the Yangtze finless porpoise is known for its intelligence and charismatic appearance; it looks like it has a perpetual smile on its face. To track how this critically endangered porpoise’s habitat range has changed over time, a team of biodiversity and conservation experts compiled 724 ancient Chinese poems referencing the porpoise from historic collections across China. Publishing in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 5, their results show that the porpoise’s range has decreased by at least 65% over the past 1,400 years, with the majority of this decline occurring in the past century.  

A recent study shows that marine oxygen levels were crucial to the evolution of Early Paleozoic trilobite body size, suggesting that oxygen may have influenced the evolution of other animals' body size as well.

The disappearance of sea ice in polar regions due to global warming not only increases the amount of light entering the ocean, but also changes its color. These changes have far-reaching consequences for photosynthetic organisms such as ice algae and phytoplankton. That is the conclusion of new research published in Nature Communications, led by marine biologists Monika Soja-Woźniak and Jef Huisman from the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED) at the University of Amsterdam.

The highest trophic niches in Mesozoic oceans were filled by diverse marine reptiles, including ichthyosaurians, plesiosaurians, and thalattosuchians, dominating food webs during the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous. Yet during the mid-Cretaceous, ichthyosaurs, thalattosuchians, and pliosaurids vanished, replaced by mosasaurs, xenopsarian plesiosaurians, and new groups like sharks, fish, turtles, and birds. This shift restructured marine ecosystems. Project SEASCAPE analyzes this turnover using phylogenies and functional data, revealing selective extinctions and divergent functional landscapes between the Early and Late Cretaceous.

In 2013, a sea star wasting syndrome decimated populations of Pisaster along the west coast of North America and along the Monterey Peninsula in California, where this study was conducted. The orange and purple stars have a hungry appetite for mussels in the rocky intertidal. Without the voracious sea stars lurking around, mussel populations exploded, expanding in cover from around five percent to more than 18 percent within three years. In the wake of the sea star die-off, mussels became a major prey surplus for sea otters, revealing a surprising link between the adjacent rocky intertidal and kelp forest ecosystems. The new research into the phenomenon shows how the loss of a keystone predator (Pisaster) in one ecosystem can impart changes to another (sea otters), linking ecosystems.