These coeds may be spending some time down at the beach, but as students of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Wood’s Holl, Mass., it’s for work rather than play. The laboratory, featured in the July 4, 1903, Scientific American Supplement, was founded on the belief of naturalist Louis Agassiz: “nature and not books should be [...]

Sea cucumbers aren’t all boring, trundling bags. Some of them swim — and glow. Though I opted to focus on creatures found at greater depths in my last post, one of the creatures observed by the Deepsea Challenger expedition in the New Britain Trench at a relatively shallow 1000 meters was just such a swimming [...]

The deepest, darkest, scariest place on the maps I loved pondering as a child was a crescent-shaped canyon in the western Pacific Ocean. It was called the Mariana Trench, and at the very, very bottom was the lowest point on Earth’s surface, the Challenger Deep. Its floor was seven terrifying miles down. What was down [...]

Blogger’s note: I’m still away from the blog taking care of important life stuff, but I’ll be back soon! This post originally appeared on March 28, 2010. It has been edited slightly. Earlier this week I posted a link to Victorian microscope slides that included arranged diatom art. People really seemed to respond to the [...]

While in the southern hemisphere, I’ve taken every opportunity I can to dive. It’s the hiking of the submarine world: good exercise, and lots of pretty stuff to see. One my final dives, on the reefs of the remote island of Rarotonga in the New-Zealand -dministered Cook Islands*(see here for locator map), I encountered an [...]

If you live in the upper ocean, it pays to be transparent to avoid the gaze of Things Bigger and Hungrier Than You, since sunlight will pass right through. But if you live deep in the ocean, where predators often come equipped standard with searchlights, being transparent means  lighting up like a Christmas tree under [...]

For years, ripples at the surface of the Dead Sea hinted there was something mysterious going on beneath its salt-laden waters. But in a lake where accidentally swallowing the water while diving could lead to near-instant asphyxiation, no one was in a hurry to find out what it might be. This year, some intrepid divers [...]

Perhaps our species’s greatest misconception about the sea was that it is inexhaustible. The idea seems rather silly now, in a world where most people are familiar with the word “overfishing.” But men once gazed into the deep and imagined that it teemed with life so plentiful that we could take and take without ever [...]

Hi there! I’m Rose, a science journalist and producer. I live in Brooklyn now, where I write, produce and generally try to explain science-y things. But in a few weeks, I’ll be writing to you from somewhere far, far away from Brooklyn: the North Atlantic Ocean. I’m heading out to sea with a research group [...]

Editor’s Note: Marine biologist William Gilly is on an expedition to study Humboldt squid on the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research vessel New Horizon in the Gulf of California. He and other scientists will spend the coming weeks learning about the giant squid, their biology and ecology on this National Science Foundation-funded expedition. This is [...]

  "What’s more," snapped the Lorax. (His dander was up.) "Let me say a few words about Gluppity-Glupp. Your machine chugs on, day and night without stop making Gluppity-Glupp. Also Schloppity-Schlopp. And what do you do with this leftover goo?… I’ll show you. You dirty old Once-ler man, you! "You’re glumping the pond where the [...]

You may remember the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) from such discoveries as the Yeti crab, the squid with elbows and my personal favourite, the pigbutt worm, and now they’re back with footage of a new species of carnivorous sponge. Seventeen years ago, Jean Vacelet and Nicole Boury-Esnault from the Centre of Oceanology at [...]

If Hell’s a glittery rainbow party of terror, you’ll find this guy having post-drinks in the pub at 10am. This is Eunice aphroditois, otherwise known as a bobbit worm. Apparently around 20 years ago, an underwater photographer thought it and other species in the Eunice genus were reminiscent enough of the Bobbitt family incident of [...]

Because I’ll never grow tired of seeing incredible footage of sea creatures, here are a few of the best ones I’ve seen lately. First up, a video by a group called Coral Morphologic, which is an art-science project led by James Cook University-educated marine biologist Colin Foord, and American musician Jared McKay. “With the aquarium [...]

I recently came across this incredible underwater photography by russian marine biologist and underwater photographer, Alexander Semenov – head of the White Sea Biological Station deep-sea diving team from the Lomonosov Moscow State University. And as always with sea creatures, an investigation into the way they work reveals that they are truly just as bizarre [...]

Who says genitals have to be between your legs? A new species of fish has literally turned the genital game on its head and is quietly running with it in the murky Meking River. Discovered in 2009 by zoologist Koichi Shibukawa from the Nagao Natural Environment Foundation in Tokyo, Japan, and described in a recent [...]

“Period Rock? You’re calling me Period Rock now? Guys, seriously, I might look like a stone, but that doesn’t mean I have the heart of one. Why doesn’t anyone ever just call me Michael?” **** Despite appearances, this is not some kind of cruelly bisected alien stone organism or a tomato thunderegg. This is Pyura [...]