Multimedia
Whales Have Their Own Dialects
Like different human social groups, short-finned pilot whales living off the coast of Hawai’i have their own sorts of vocal dialects, according to a new study by WHOI researchers. “It’s…
Read MoreA Kiss from a Clam
Giant clams of the Tridacna genus have muscular mantles whose tissue can come in splendid colors, such as this bright blue. Eight species of Tridacna, most threatened by overharvesting, live…
Read MoreListening in the Depths
Sound carries messages in the watery medium of the ocean. To listen in, scientists use underwater microphones, or hydrophones, to record calls from whales or sound waves from airguns towed…
Read MoreCrabs Help Solve Mystery
Fiddler crabs answered a question marine chemists and ecologists have long pondered: Does oil still have impacts on wildlife decades after it was spilled in a salt marsh? Researchers led…
Read MoreBottling Parasites
2018 WHOI Summer Student Fellow Emily Maness (foreground) and undergraduate summer student Sarah Lott collect water from Salt Pond in Falmouth, Massachusetts. In the water are single-celled parasites that attack…
Read MoreRobotic Trailblazer
Shortly after a WHOI-French-led expedition found the wreck of Titanic on the seafloor in 1985, the Navy commissioned a return mission to test a small remotely operated vehicle (ROV) with…
Read MoreResplendent Coral
Viewed in polarized light and magnified 10 times, this thin-section sample of a skeleton of a Pacific reef-building coral, Acropora gemmifera, looks more like abstract art. The skeleton is made…
Read MoreSkeletons in the Corals
Nathan Mollica (left), a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, and WHOI scientist Weifu Guo examine a sample cored from the skeleton of a coral. They put the cores…
Read MoreDeep Sea Stamp of Approval
This souvenir envelope, called a dive cover, went to 2,013 meters in the ocean on dive 5,000 of the Human Occupied Vehicle Alvin. Join WHOI, the USPS, and the DSV Alvin…
Read MoreShuffling the Deck on Deck
Graduate students in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program play a few rounds of cards in the galley aboard the research vessel Neil Armstrong. They were returning to port after a research…
Read MoreThe Grinch who Stole Sentry
The deep-sea exploration vehicle called Sentry has been festooned with decorations and “faces” over the years, often thanks to WHOI engineer Justin Fujii whose artistic medium is electrical tape. Sentry is an autonomous underwater vehicle…
Read MoreStar of Antarctica
A WHOI scientific team follows a ridge above the Koettlitz Glacier en route to conducting research in Antarctica in December 2007. The sun is due north over the Ross Sea,…
Read MoreCalling All Whales
In 1949, WHOI biologist William Schevill (right) and his wife Barbara Lawrence used a crude hydrophone and a dictating machine to record beluga whales from a small boat in the…
Read MoreHail to the Discovering Heroes
Crowds of family members, WHOI staff, and other well-wishers—including hundreds of journalists and 18 film crews—thronged the pier at WHOI in September 1985, as the research vessel Knorr returned from…
Read MorePrecision Testing
WHOI marine chemist Aleck Wang and his research team are developing a new instrument to measure two key factors in the global carbon cycle that helps regulate Earth’s climate. The…
Read MoreLatching On
An image from a high-powered microscope reveals a microbe that has colonized a microplastic fragment collected in the North Atlantic Ocean. Such marine microbes entice fish to ingest microplastics. Scientists…
Read MoreSound Warp
This curious, colorful image may look a little like five bananas, but it is actually a spectrogram of sound waves recorded by a hydrophone in the ocean. More particularly, it…
Read MoreCool, Calm, and Collected
WHOI scientist Rocky Geyer collects a water sample in the South River in Marshfield, Mass., to analyze the amount of suspended sediments in it. There won’t be much on a…
Read MoreThere Goes the Neighborhood
A curious penguin observes a group of scientists temporarily squatting on an icy terrain in Antarctica. WHOI scientist Ben Van Mooy (right) is leading a team that will core through…
Read MorePaying a Port Call
The WHOI dock is homeport to WHOI-operated ships, but it also hosts visiting research vessels from other institutions. In June 1985, Alcyone, the research vessel of the late Jacques Cousteau,…
Read MoreAll Aboard the Armstrong
After a tour of WHOI’s research vessel Neil Armstrong, a group of friends of WHOI stands before the ship’s name on the starboard bow: (From left) General Gordon Sullivan, retired Army Chief…
Read MorePlastics Adrift
Simulated models of how plastics are transported in the global ocean show that most plastics concentrate in the middle of subtropical gyres (left). However, large-scale ocean circulation systems such as…
Read MoreCoring Corals
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist Anne Cohen (left) and Nathan Mollica, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, extract core samples from a giant Porites coral in Risong Bay, Palau. They and WHOI scientist Weifu Guo were…
Read MoreVirgin Islands Research
Laura Weber, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, teaches middle and high school students of the U.S. Virgin Islands about the role of microorganisms in the health and…
Read More