Group items tagged

Why seagrass is so important to our environment.

Islands Draw Record Backing to Protect Sharks From Fin Trade.

Tough species of corals can go mobile and lay the foundations for new reefs in otherwise inhospitable areas, a study shows.

Drops locked inside rock offer clues to modeling Earth's climate and ocean circulation.

A team of researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Manta Trust has successfully scanned a pregnant wild reef manta ray underwater to obtain clear ultrasound images of her foetus, using the world's first contactless underwater ultrasound scanner.

Assessing the resilience of islands toward altered ocean climate pressures and providing robust adaptation measures requires an understanding of the interaction between morphological processes and the underlying hydrodynamic drivers. In this sense, this study presents changing sediment volumes on various temporal scales for the fringing reef island Fuvahmulah. Based on three field campaigns, conducted over 2 years, aerial imagery provides information on marine aggregates of the island's beaches. In addition, high resolution climate reanalysis data serves as input into an empirical and a numerical approach. Together, both approaches describe the driving processes behind volumetric seasonal and interannual changes: On the one hand, the empirical method quantifies sediment transport rates for calcareous sediments over the whole time span of the data set by considering wind and swell waves from multiple directions. On the other hand, the numerical method gives insights into the complexity of currents induced by dominant wave components. Combining these methods facilitates hindcasting and predicting morphological changes under varying wave climate, assessing sediment pathways over the whole reef, and describing the seasonal and interannual evolution of the sand spit Thoondu. As a result, this study reveals sediment distribution on different spatio-temporal scales and elucidates their significance in the design of conventional and alternative low-regret coastal adaptation.

Manta rays are large planktivores that inhabit tropical and subtropical waters globally, which are generally oligotrophic (MARSHALL, COMPAGNO & BENNETT, 2009). Therefore, to meet their metabolic needs, manta rays need to locate pulses of zooplankton productivity. Similar to other tropical planktivores, such as leatherback turtles Dermochelys coriacea (HAYS et al., 2006) and whale sharks Rhincodon typus (ROHNER et al., 2015), manta rays aggregate where and when conditions result in elevated local productivity (DEWAR et al., 2008; ANDERSON, ADAM & GOES, 2011; Jaine et al., 2012). However, these productivity 'hotspots' are ephemeral in nature and often difficult for researchers to locate and characterise (HARRIS et al., 2020; HARRIS et al., 2021), which makes the direct study of planktivore feeding ecology challenging (SIMS, 2008; ROHNER et al., 2015).