While bacteria, phytoplankton and sponges play an important part in this week’s scientific mix, there is still a place for some leviathans, with tales of whales both living and dead…
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Back to basics this week, most of the science is involved with nutrition – eating and getting eaten – with a brief interlude from diatoms who are working hard on producing toxins to ensure that anyone who does eat them regrets it! The theme is picked up again in Fisheries, here our human apetite is pushing global fish stocks to the point of no return. To start though, a little fun with a novel tunicate…

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Welcome to this week’s marine science briefing, which starts with a sad tail of fickle fishes, before the main course on getting about underwater. In this we see three adaptations by marine vertebrates to propulsion, including how whale design can improve underwater turbines, and what the fastest sharks would be wearing at the 2012 Olympics in London!

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Leatherback turtles are popular this issue, with scientists tracking them across the Atlantic, how they thermo-regulate, and how to stop them ending up in the soup… Otherwise there is a nice bit of experimental work ‘proving’ that faster flow = more life (this doesn’t mean that low-flow = no life, however!). We are also, perhaps, getting closer to understanding why coral bleaching occurs at a molecular level.

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This issue we look at the behaviour of seals and jellyfish – choose the ideal holiday destination for starfish – then dive into a microbial ocean. How to manage fisheries, this time on a Chilean archipelago (there are some mitigating circumstances here, but best of luck guys), and catch up on more news from the Gulf of Mexico. One factor that we need to take on board is that the Gulf was in bad shape before the spill, and that the $20B oil spill response isn’t going to start managing the Gulf ecology properly.

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A real mixed-bag this week, our marine science highlights consider techniques for identifying viruses (or molecular quasi-species) and nanotech trackers to follow zooplankton. In conservation, we see progress on a new generation of bioreactors that promise to remove nitrogen from land runoff. In fisheries, even the best environmental practices at fish farms need improvement. In pollution, science of the gulf oil spill in the service of the law.

For those of you who worry about climate change, but feel they can’t do anything about it right now, we finish with the opportunity to transcribe the logs of British warships from the turn of the last century. The transcriptions will extend our baseline data about climate back in time over a wide area of the Earth’s surface, and so improve the qualty of our climatic forecasts.
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This week we start at the beginning of the marine food web – with algae blooming in the SW Atlantic, and plumbing the depths around Hawaii. In marine exploitation we see plans to mine hydrothermal vents in Papua New Guinea. Conservation worries in the Indian Ocean, with extensive bleaching now occurring due to high water temperatures. Coccolithophores make a guest appearance in climate change – responsible for absorbing large amounts of the CO₂ we’re pumping into the atmosphere – an understanding of their biology takes on global significance…

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Lots of stuff in this roundup in which we travel in time from an up-to-date science review from the gulf oil spill (handy for next month’s talks!) back to ancient cnidaria. Exciting changes in fisheries protection for the US Pacific fleet, which is to see the number of boats reduced to match the number of fish that can be legally caught. More on the formation of shoals – what is the cost of grouping together for protection? To start, however, a first glimpse into the life of one of the largest groups of marine organisms – the bacteria:
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Lots of pollution – the Deepwater Horizon was now the largest spill ever (official). Problems with policing conservation policy. How alike are flocks and shoals? Read on…
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A good couple of weeks of marine science here – from fun to fundamental stuff, and often both together! Fundamental and important is the possibility that studies of nitrogen uptake in the marine ecosystem may have have underestimated the amounts of nitrogen being fixed by marine organisms. Fundamental and fun – well, take your choice from scampering scallops to the secretive sex-life of snails!

In conservation the emerging issue is deep-sea bottom trawling; there doesn’t seem to be any way of controlling this, so I guess the industry will continue until the stocks crash, taking an entire ecosystem with them (if you care, buy fish from sustainable sources – this does not include any deep sea species!). In pollution the important stories are still with the Gulf Oil Slick, with the publication of BP’s report into the accident, and some interesting strands in the debate as to where the oil has gone…

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