The University of Alicante is participating in the largest scientific assessment driven to date by the United Nations to analyse the health of the world's oceans. This international project brings together hundreds of specialists from across the globe and currently serves as the primary global benchmark for guiding marine conservation policies internationally.

In marine environments, sponges tend to eat other organisms to get their nutrients. But a new study, published by the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED) researchers in Functional Ecology, demonstrates how sponges may also use photosynthesis, just like plants. This phenomenon can help with the productivity – or amount of energy and food produced – in tropical coral reefs, and perhaps in other ecosystems where sponges are common too.

High-resolution sediment analyses from the Arabian Sea reveal, for the first time, that summer and winter monsoons respond differently to global climate change. Researchers from the University of Bremen contributed to the study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

A new study led by researchers at HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research in an international collaboration with Queen Mary University of London shows that rising water temperatures can shift the diet of an invasive crustacean from animal prey toward algae, a finding with wide implications for how invasive species reshape freshwater food webs under climate change. The research, published in Limnology and Oceanography Letters, found that warming causes a reallocation of diet from carnivory toward herbivory instead of simply increasing feeding intensity, particularly when larger zooplankton prey are available.

The ANERIS project has held its Final Consortium Meeting in person, bringing together all project partners for a two-day progress gathering.

A new study led by the University of Plymouth has used more than six decades of data to show that plankton abundance is declining across vast swathes of the North East Atlantic – a region covering the Atlantic Ocean from Portugal to Norway, and the entirety of the North Sea.

A new study has uncovered a previously unknown antiviral defense mechanism in sea anemones, revealing that animals may have evolved more than one way to fight viral infections. Researchers discovered that a protein resembling a key component of the human immune system actually plays the opposite role, yet remains essential for effective antiviral protection. The findings challenge assumptions about the evolution of immunity and suggest that fundamentally different antiviral strategies have emerged across the animal kingdom.

Researchers at KAUST have conducted the first global assessment of how marine ecosystems responded during 2023, the first year when global temperatures temporarily exceeded 1.5°C above pre‑industrial levels. The team documented 201 ecological impact events across the world’s oceans, creating one of the most comprehensive records of marine disruptions during an extreme warming year.