Oceanus Online Archive
Li’l Alvin
Tom Ryder is a professional underwater diver and a radio-controlled model builder. That combination, naturally, led to a fully operational miniature version of the deep-sea sub Alvin.
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The Mesocosm Lab
A mesocosm is an ecosystem in miniature, providing a useful middle ground between an indoor lab and the great outdoors.
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Mysterious Jellyfish Makes a Comeback
In July 2013, Mary Carman, a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, was diving in Farm Pond on Marthaâs Vineyard when something that felt like hypodermic needles stung her face.
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Message Bottled in an Email
Amid the dunes of a tiny island in the North Atlantic, a scientist found a sandblasted bottle with a note in it.
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WHOI CSI Lab Investigates Rare Whales
Two seldomly seen deep-diving whales called True’s beaked whales were found dead on a beach on Long Island, N.Y. Why did the whales, an adult female and male juvenile,die?
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What Causes the Atlantic to Bloom?
Every spring, waters in the North Atlantic Ocean explode into green and white patches as countless microscopic marine plants bloom.
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Can Squid Abide Ocean’s Lower pH?
To most people, squid are calamari: delicious when fried. But to WHOI researchers Max Kaplan and Aran Mooney, squid are another reason to be concerned about ocean acidification.
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Lush Life, Deep Down
Scientists find an active ecosystem of bacteria, archaea, and fungi in the sediments far beneath the sea floor.
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WHOI Scientists Garner Awards in 2013
As the year 2013 ends, we profile scientists who recently received awards and recognition for their work.
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Behold the ‘Plastisphere’
Plastic debris provides living space for a variety of marine microbes.
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Dropping a Laboratory into the Sea
Scientists at WHOI deploy moored robotic laboratories in the Gulf of Maine for long-term monitoring of red tide algae
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Call of the Whales
Robotic gliders equipped with acoustic monitoring devices can now eavesdrop on whales, enabling researchers to locate the elusive animals before they surface and to warn ship pilots in the area to slow down to reduce the chances of a deadly collision.
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The Return of the Seals
WHOI biologist Rebecca Gast examines whether the recovered and thriving population of gray seals in Cape Cod waters has affected water quality off the beaches they frequent.
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The Decline and Fall of the Emperor Penguin?
Climate change is shifting conditions on which Emperor penguins in Antarctica depend to sustain their populations.
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What Doomed the Stromatolites?
About a billion years before the dinosaurs became extinct, stromatolites roamed the Earth until they mysteriously disappeared. Well, not roamed exactly. Stromatolites (“layered rocks”) are rocky structures made by photosynthetic…
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An Oddity about Lyme Disease Bacteria
The bacterial species that causes Lyme disease avoids a key human defense by not requiring iron. For a WHOI microbial chemist, that raised a big question: What does it use instead of iron?
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Corals’ Indispensable Bacterial Buddies
Coral reefs, like human beings, may be superorganisms that depend on communities of microbes living within and around them for their survival.
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An Ocean That’s No Longer Wild
Like most fathers, Simon Thorrold plays tag with his young daughter. But Thorrold, a biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, also plays tag with 30-foot-long whale sharks, like the one…
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Mining Marine Microbes for New Drugs
The ocean is a combat zone where marine microbes are constantly making chemical compounds to kill competitors or protect themselves. Could some of those compounds lead to pharmaceuticals that could help people?
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Sassy Scallops
MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student Meredith White examined how increasingly acidic ocean waters affect scallop shells in their critical early stages of development.
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A Quest For Resilient Reefs
Anne Cohen’s forte is corals. From the skeletons of massive corals, she has extracted long-term records of changing ocean and climate conditions. In lab experiments and expeditions, she is investigating…
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