A team of international researchers led by the University of Vienna investigated the development of shark and ray biodiversity over the past 100 million years. Their surprising results show a continuous decline in diversity since the Eocene, 45 million years ago, which contradicts previous assumptions that biodiversity was either stable or increasing. This study, recently published in the renowned journal Scientific Reports, provides crucial insights for modern marine conservation.

Two Virginia high school students have discovered how sea anemones respond to salinity changes caused by hurricane rainfall. As hurricanes worsen due to climate change, this important information could help conservation efforts and inspire advocacy efforts. The research was shared in a paper published in Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Research on October 7.

Sudden shifts in the Southern Westerly Winds 15,000 years ago - after the last Ice Age - triggered a massive growth of peatland swamps.

A new paper by post-doctoral researchers Emily Sperou and Renato Borras-Chavez in the journal Polar Biology discusses a unique phenomenon observed in a reclusive Antarctic animal: postmortem attentive behavior, or PAB, in the solitary leopard seal. Borras-Chavez and Sperou are members of URI’s CEAL Lab; their study presents one of the first detailed records of maternal behavior in leopard seals of South America, including the first detailed account of PAB in the species, and one of the longest PAB events recorded in mammals.

New research from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biolog revealed Indigenous aquaculture systems, such as fishponds, effectively shield fish populations from the negative impacts of climate change, demonstrating resilience and bolstering local food security.

Two new studies from researchers at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography provide encouraging news about California's beaches at both local and statewide scales. 

The oceans have to play a role in helping humanity remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to curb dangerous climate warming. But are we ready to scale up the technologies that will do the job?

Published on 17 November in the Journal of Applied Ecology, the research introduces a novel metric called “overlap intensity” which for the first time, measures not just the extent of shared space between penguins and fishing vessels, but how many penguins are actually affected by this overlap.