All the news on the Earth's largest environment.

A comment on Reddit reminded me of a question that I have received many times. The question is always a good one because it stems from knowledge and deductive reasoning. The said question requires one ...

I have only seen a hydrothermal vent once, during Dive 73 aboard the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute’s Doc Ricketts. Unlike many deep-sea biologists, I have always been more interested in ...

When I first learned about rhizocephalan barnacles I lost my appetite. I was taking a parasitology course, and even though I’d developed a thick skin, something about this insidious creature deeply ...

Don’t believe everything you read on the internet, despite what cryptozoologists may be telling you. Plesiosaurs, like mermaids, Megalodon, and a representative democracy, don’t really exist anymore, ...

Biologists have a habit of naming things after cool animals. Cars named after comb jellies, internet passwords after giant squid. Most of these names I recognized, but then I saw my friend’s wifi ...

Magnapinna squids are one of the deep-sea more ethereal creatures. Little is known of these squid as very few have ever been captured, although over the last decade with the increased usage of ...

Megalodon (Carcharocles megalodon) is the largest shark, at a magnificent maximum length of 18 meters (59 feet), to ever have dwelled in the oceans. We know primarily about Megalodon’s existence ...

Like most deep-sea biologists, I have a large collection of decorated Styrofoam cups. A couple dozen line the bookshelf of my office, each displaying a rainbow of Sharpie colors. Each cup is ...

Solar eclipse. From Wikimedia commons. On July 20th, 1963, three scientists sat on a research ship 200 miles south of Woods Hole, MA, waiting for something remarkable. They were nearly 4000m above the ...

Evolution is repetitive, especially if it produces adaptations that work well. If it’s all about survival, spines do the trick throughout the mollusk world. Scorpion Spider Conch (Lambis scorpio) ...

Ben Schmidt made this wonderful visualization of shipping from 1750-1850 using ship log data. (H/T Metafilter). It’s long, but worth watching. You can see the infamous Triangle Trade, the effect of ...