Research Highlights
Oceanus Magazine
For years, sperm whales and elephant seals were thought to hold world records for holding their breath under water. But those animals have nothing on beaked whales. Using digital tags temporarily suction-cupped to two species of beaked whales, researchers led…
The ship hit the whale with a force that snapped her 14-foot jawbone like a toothpick and left a 4-foot-long crack in her skull. Known as 2150 among scientists, she was a young, fertile North Atlantic right whale—exactly the wrong…
It’s not hard to figure out how hagfish got their name, since they aren’t exactly warm and fuzzy. Slithery, skinny, coated in gooey slime, and often found wriggling and eating in the guts of dead whales, most people probably don’t…
When scientists found lush thickets of 6-foot-tall, red-tipped tubeworms on the seafloor in 1977, they realized that life could thrive without sunlight in extreme environments. When they discovered that the tubeworms had no mouth, digestive tract, or anus, they learned…
In 2003, we traveled by ship to the New England Seamounts—a chain of extinct, undersea volcanoes about 500 miles off the East Coast of North America—to help collect dead corals that have been on the bottom of the ocean for…
News Releases
WHOI scientists delve into the elusive fish’s role in the food web
While the impacts of plastic pollution on human health and the environment are growing, the report finds, increasing harm due to plastics is not inevitable.
Filter-feeding whales sample the Arctic food web, tracking decades of change
Differences in brain structure between echolocating and non-echolocating marine mammals offers insight into auditory processing
WHOI researchers part of collaborative, international effort to increase Marine Protected Areas and other strategies
News & Insights
WHOI’s Dennis McGillicuddy on why ocean life matters deeply to the Sunshine State
Are you an ocean lover? Go a little deeper with these courtship tips from beneath the waves!
April 24 marks the first-ever Right Whale Day in Massachusetts. WHOI biologist and veterinarian Michael Moore recently met with the resident who brought this special recognition about– and explains why it’s important to raise awareness about the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.
A report out this week in Current Biology reveal that critically endangered North Atlantic right whales are up to three feet shorter than 40 years ago. This startling conclusion reinforces what scientists have suspected: even when entanglements do not lead directly to the death of North Atlantic right whales, they can have lasting effects on the imperiled population that may now number less than 400 animals. Further, females that are entangled while nursing produce smaller calves.
May 10, 2021 During a joint research trip on February 28 in Cape Cod Bay, Mass., WHOI whale trauma specialist Michael Moore, National Geographic photographer Brian Skerry, and scientists from New England Aquarium, witnessed a remarkable biological event: North…