Search Results for: Ocean

An international team of scientists are working at a rapid pace to study environmental conditions behind the fast-acting and widespread coral bleaching currently plaguing Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. NASA’s satellite data supply scientists with near-real-time sea surface temperature and ocean color data to give them faster than ever insight into the impact coral bleaching can have on global ecology.

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is a massive marine habitat system made up of 2,90

As long-lived predators at the top of the marine food chain, albatrosses accumulate toxic contaminants such as PCBs, DDT, and mercury in their bodies. A new study has found dramatic differences in contaminant levels between two closely related albatross species that forage in different areas of the North Pacific. Researchers also found that levels of PCBs and DDT have increased in both species over the past ten years.

The differences in contaminant levels between black-footed and

Female harbor seal pups whose blubber falls below average levels may be at higher risk of delayed sexual maturation or death, even if they get enough fat in their diets later on, according to a new study sponsored by The American Physiological Society and presented at Experimental Biology 2006.

The study found that harbor seals pups that were heavier when captured from the wild continued to gain weight and grow regardless of whether the researchers placed them on a high fat or

Large quantities of Saharan dust are helping to fertilize the massive plankton blooms that occur in the tropical eastern Atlantic, a research project has confirmed.

A team including researchers from the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia has been studying the desert dust, which is rich in nitrogen, iron and phosphorus, and its effect on the ocean’s nutrients, plankton production and the food chain.

The £600,000 project, is part of the Sur

Much of what scientists learn about the evolution of Earth’s first animals will have to be gleaned from spherical embryos fossilized under very specific conditions, according to a new study by Indiana University Bloomington and University of Bristol researchers in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Purported animal embryo fossils have been reported continuously over the last 12 years, mainly by paleontologists working in China. Scientists di

Let us suppose that a new fruit fly species is observed on an island in the southwestern Indian Ocean. As soon as the information is confirmed, it is released on the Internet. This type of alert can now be issued from five Indian Ocean Commission (IOC) islands – Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion, Seychelles – involved in the regional crop protection programme (PRPV). This is thanks to a website, www.prpv.org, to which crop protection professionals now have access.

The programm