Group items tagged

Five distinct humpback whale populations have been identified across the North Pacific Ocean in the most comprehensive genetic study of the mammals in this region yet, a new study reports.

Going, going, gone. Five of the Solomon Islands have been swallowed whole by rising sea levels, offering a glimpse into the future of other low-lying nations. Sea levels in the Solomon Islands have been climbing by 7 millimetres per year over the last two decades, due to a double whammy of global warming and stronger trade winds.

Around the world, disease-carrying mosquitoes are advancing at speed, taking viruses such as dengue and Zika, plus a host of lesser-known ills such as chikungunya and St. Louis encephalitis, into new territories from Europe to the Pacific. "The concern is that we have these species spreading everywhere. Today the focus is on Zika but they can carry many different viruses and pathogens," said Anna-Bella Failloux, head of the department that tracks mosquito viruses at France's Institut Pasteur.

The short film opens with two questions: "So what determines how many species live in a given place? Or how many individuals of the species can live somewhere?" The research that provided answers to these questions was set in motion by key experiments by ecologists Robert Paine and James Estes. Robert Paine's starfish exclusion experiments on the coast of Washington state showed that removing starfish from this marine ecosystem has a big impact on the population sizes of other species, establishing the starfish as a keystone species. James Estes and colleague John Palmisano discovered that the kelp forest ecosystems of the North Pacific are regulated by the presence or absence of sea otters, which feed on sea urchins that consume kelp. These direct and indirect effects of sea otters on other species describe a trophic cascade. These early studies were the inspiration for hundreds of investigations on other keystone species and trophic cascades, as well as ongoing studies into the regulation of population sizes and species numbers.

By analyzing the chemical signatures of six coral reef cores taken from multiple sites in the Pacific Ocean around Panama, the scientists found an extreme weather event associated with what we would call La Niña today triggered the reef collapse. A series of events similar to El Niño continued to suppress the reef for the next two millenniums.

Not surprisingly, Hambrick and Tucker-Drob found a correlation between practice and musical accomplishment. But they also found that the amount of practice young musicians engaged in was influenced by their genetic make-up.

Residents of the Solomon Islands in the Pacific have some of the darkest skin seen outside of Africa. They also have the highest occurrence of blond hair seen in any population outside of Europe. Now, researchers have found the single gene that explains these fair tresses.

PORTLAND, Ore. (Reuters) - Radiation from Japan's 2011 nuclear disaster has spread off North American shores and contamination is increasing at previously identified sites, although levels are still too low to threaten human or ocean life, scientists said on Thursday. Tests of hundreds of samples of Pacific Ocean water confirmed that Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant continues to leak radioactive isotopes more than four years after its meltdown, said Ken Buesseler, marine radiochemist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

And as the El Nino weather system has been storming across the Pacific this season, it has stirred up ocean waters enough to cool down the original Blob off of Alaska, but at the same time helped give birth to what has been nicknamed the "Son of Blob" off the coast of Southern California. The still-warmer Alaskan waters, and Son of Blob sector are expected to continue to magnify the El Nino effect for months to come, according to Weather Underground's "Blob Watch" blog.