by Julia DiPinto | Aug 6, 2025 | In the field, In the lab, News Briefs
By Julia DiPinto and Dan Distel Everyone loves sea stars—but did you know they are keystone predators that help shape and maintain the biodiversity of our coastal ecosystems? That is why Angela Jones, a dedicated PhD candidate, educator, and researcher at the Marine...
by Ryan Pianka | Oct 31, 2023 | In the field, News Briefs
Behold the mighty Bobbit worm, striking from the seafloor! Image Credit: Daniel Kwok CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 It’s October again and that means one thing: it’s the time of year for ghosts, goblins, and spooky monsters. Fantastical creatures like these might make the real world...
by Dan Distel | Oct 12, 2023 | In the field, In the lab, News Briefs, Research
Did you know that 75–90% of the estimated 1–2 million species living in the world’s ocean remain undiscovered and undescribed? Together, these species constitute the ocean’s taxonomic dark matter—the critical portion of life’s diversity hidden beneath the waves. To...
by Dan Distel | Sep 30, 2023 | In the field, In the lab, News Briefs, Research
Staghorn corals (Acropora cervicornis) were once among the most dominant reef-building corals in the Caribbean. However, starting in the mid-1980s, these iconic corals began a steep decline. Due to climate change and a mysterious bacterial plague known as “white band...
by Zack Anderson | Jul 22, 2023 | In the field, Research
There is no Earth 2, but there is Biosphere 2—an experimental ecosystem entirely isolated from Earth’s atmosphere and ocean. Built more than 30 years ago in Arizona, Biosphere 2 was created as an experimental life raft designed to test the feasibility of creating...
by Zack Anderson | May 19, 2023 | In the field, In the lab, News Briefs, Research
Snails are mollusks with distinctive spiral shells. Slugs are snail-like mollusks that have no shells. Easy to tell apart, right? But not so fast. Mollusks of the family Velutinidae are small marine mollusks that have a shell like a snail—but that shell is small and...
