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The Ear Bone’s Connected to the Fish Home

September 3, 2008

WHOI biologist Simon Thorrold holds a fish otolith—an ear bone—that can serve as a natural tag to reconstruct the history of temperatures and seawater chemistry wherever a fish has lived. Not only does that information say something about the environment the fish are living in, but it speaks directly to how and where the offspring of fish are hatched, reared, and most likely to thrive. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)