New research is calling for a fundamental shift in how Australian universities and scientists publish research that draws on Indigenous Knowledges (sum of the understandings, skills, and philosophies developed by Indigenous societies with long histories of interaction with and custodianship of their natural surroundings), warning that current academic practices risk sidelining First Nations authority while benefiting from their expertise.

The study led by Flinders University and the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), published as a major perspective piece, argues that Indigenous groups must be treated as active partners in research publications — not just contributors acknowledged in footnotes or ‘personal communications’.

In the deserts of southeastern Arizona, harvester ants congregate with serrated jaws agape outside the nests of much smaller cone ants. However, the nests’ inhabitants are not threatened. Instead, they crawl all over the harvester ants and lick and nibble their body surfaces—the first known example of an ant that cleans a much larger ant species. The unusual behavior, described for the first time this week in the journal Ecology and Evolution, was observed by entomologist Mark Moffett, a research associate at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

New evidence shows melt ponds in the northern parts of the Arctic may be biological sources of ice-nucleating particles, a key ingredient for cloud formation that has been largely overlooked.

Scientists have developed a new method to measure ocean surface currents over large areas in greater detail than ever before. Called GOFLOW (Geostationary Ocean Flow), the approach applies deep learning to thermal images from weather satellites already in orbit.

Common human painkillers also work on Norway lobsters, according to research from the University of Gothenburg. This is further evidence that crustaceans may feel pain and that more humane methods of killing them need to be developed.

Few studies have investigated coastal marine plankton and aggregate abundance and diversity with high frequency over a long time period. Here, a group of researchers deployed a cabled marine Oshima Coastal Environmental data Acquisition Network System (OCEANS) observatory in 20 m of water off the coast of Oshima Island in Japan to establish plankton diversity and plankton and aggregate abundance as a function of ocean turbulence during two 4-month periods spanning 2014 to 2016.

The climate crisis seems to be altering gray whales’ access to food, leading them to change their migration paths and forage in San Francisco Bay — a busy shipping area with a narrow bottleneck both whales and boats must cross. Scientists surveying these whales suspect that many don’t survive to leave the bay: of the 114 individuals they identified, only four were seen in more than one year between 2018 and 2025, and 21 were found dead, giving a minimum mortality rate of 18%. Many deaths were caused by vessel strike injuries, while some others are due to starvation. 

The real climate risks to Ireland from changes to the Atlantic currents that sustain our mild climate are obscured by exaggerated claims in media headlines and movies.

That’s according to Dr Gerard McCarthy, a Maynooth University (MU) oceanographer at the Irish Climate Analysis and Research UnitS (ICARUS) in the Department of Geography, who has led a new article for Nature Climate Change.

The latest paper is a retrospective on a landmark 2015 study led by Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, which identified long-term Atlantic cooling as a sign that the Atlantic Meridional Circulation (AMOC) was weakening.

In a paper published in SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences, a research team systematically interpreted the key scientific issues such as the DO threshold, structural characteristics, distribution patterns, formation and maintenance mechanisms, and driving factors of the OMZ in the context of global change. It may provide important scientific basis for further exploring the coupling relationship between global change and oceanic OMZ, and for understanding marine hypoxia and deoxygenation issues from a global perspective

During warm summer nights when the full moon rises, some species of polychaetes swim up from the seafloor to spawn. It’s a perilous journey, because hungry jellyfish are waiting in the water column. This has now been documented for the first time.