Ocean Life
Big Questions About Tiny Bacteria
It’s 3 a.m., and Jesse McNichol is struggling to stay awake. Since midafternoon, he’s been in his lab, tending to a jumble of glassware, plastic tubing, and metal cylinders filled…
Coral-Current Connections
Will climate change shift a key ocean current in the Pacific? A graduate student is…
It’s Hard to Kill a Killifish
Summer Student Fellow Lily Helfrich is using a new molecular tool, microRNA analysis, to explore…
On the Trail of an Invader
To find out when and how fast a small gray barnacle came to New England…
Scallops Under Stress
Like other marine species, scallops face multiple climate change-related problems. Summer Student Fellow Cailan Sugano…
Proteomics Reveals Ocean’s Inner Workings
In a new study, WHOI scientists have demonstrated how the emerging biomedical technique of measuring…
From Penguins to Polar Bears
Polar ecosystems are especially vulnerable to climate change. They are also notably hard to study…
A Haven for Whale Sharks
Scientists discovered an aggregation of juvenile whale sharks in the Red Sea and used satellite…
Alvin‘s Animals
From orange octopi and furry yeti crabs to the largest known anemone, pilots and scientists…
Uncovering the Ocean’s Biological Pump
Dan Ohnemus clearly remembers the highlight of his fourth-grade class in Bourne, Mass. He and…
Drug Discovery in the Ocean
WHOI scientists are investigating a wide range of unexplored microbes that produce chemicals with potential…
Cystic Fibrosis
Illustration by Eric Taylor, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
The Mesocosm Lab
A mesocosm is an ecosystem in miniature, providing a useful middle ground between an indoor…
Mysterious Jellyfish Makes a Comeback
In July 2013, Mary Carman, a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, was diving in…
WHOI CSI Lab Investigates Rare Whales
Two seldomly seen deep-diving whales called True's beaked whales were found dead on a beach…
What Causes the Atlantic to Bloom?
Every spring, waters in the North Atlantic Ocean explode into green and white patches as…
Lush Life, Deep Down
Scientists find an active ecosystem of bacteria, archaea, and fungi in the sediments far beneath…
Behold the ‘Plastisphere’
Plastic debris provides living space for a variety of marine microbes.
Call of the Whales
Robotic gliders equipped with acoustic monitoring devices can now eavesdrop on whales, enabling researchers to…
The Return of the Seals
WHOI biologist Rebecca Gast examines whether the recovered and thriving population of gray seals in…
The Decline and Fall of the Emperor Penguin?
Climate change is shifting conditions on which Emperor penguins in Antarctica depend to sustain their…
What Doomed the Stromatolites?
About a billion years before the dinosaurs became extinct, stromatolites roamed the Earth until they…
An Oddity about Lyme Disease Bacteria
The bacterial species that causes Lyme disease avoids a key human defense by not requiring…
Corals’ Indispensable Bacterial Buddies
Coral reefs, like human beings, may be superorganisms that depend on communities of microbes living…