Ocean Life
Alvin‘s Animals
From orange octopi and furry yeti crabs to the largest known anemone, pilots and scientists diving in the Alvin submersible continue to find amazing marine creatures.
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…
An Ocean That’s No Longer Wild
Like most fathers, Simon Thorrold plays tag with his young daughter. But Thorrold, a biologist…
Mining Marine Microbes for New Drugs
The ocean is a combat zone where marine microbes are constantly making chemical compounds to…
Sassy Scallops
MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student Meredith White examined how increasingly acidic ocean waters affect scallop…
A Quest For Resilient Reefs
Anne Cohen’s forte is corals. From the skeletons of massive corals, she has extracted long-term…
The Harshest Habitats on Earth
With help from ROV Jason and a new, high-tech sampling instrument, scientists discover that even…
Why Haven’t the Cod Come Back?
A WHOI biologist is analyzing fish scales dating back to the 1930s to unravel changes…
An Ocean Instrument Is Born
Every new ocean instrument goes through growing pains. But the Submersible Incubation Device, nicknamed SID,…