When you build a house, it affects the surrounding ecosystem. The same thing applies to houses built by fiddler crabs in salt marshes. Their burrows can help or hinder the surrounding plants, affect the flow of water, and perhaps cause the marsh to send more greenhouse gases into the air. Thanks to all of that, fiddlers are sometimes described as “…

In 1875, Navy lieutenant commander Charles Dwight Sigsbee and his ship, the George S. Blake, began a journey into the history books. They started measuring the depth of the Gulf of Mexico with a mechanism that Sigsbee created. When the job was finished three years later, the ship had measured the entire Gulf—the first ocean basin to have an accurat…

Olive trees are sprouting all across the Balearic Islands—a chain off the Mediterranean coast of Spain. The largest island, Mallorca, has more than 800,000 cultivated trees. They yield a good portion of the world’s supply of extra virgin olive oil. More trees—of both wild and cultivated varieties—have been showing up on the surrounding islands. The…

The classic example of chaos theory is called the butterfly effect: If a butterfly flaps its wings over China, it creates ripples in the air that might eventually trigger storms over the Americas. Something similar may be playing out over the South China Sea and the surrounding land: Changes in climate conditions there may influence the rest of the…

If you’re afraid of the dark, you should avoid the “midnight zone” in the oceans. It’s so far down that no sunlight ever reaches it. The zone’s inhabitants include creatures with bulging eyes and big, sharp teeth, and some with bright, wiggling “lures” to attract prey. One inhabitant also looks like the stuff of nightmares, but it’s a threat only t…

In a classic Jules Verne novel, the submarine Nautilus travels “20,000 leagues under the sea.” You might think that “20,000 leagues” indicated the sub’s depth. But you’d need a really deep ocean for that: a league is three miles, so 20,000 leagues is 60,000 miles. The title tells us how far the Nautilus traveled through the oceans. Over the centuri…

The telescopefish has a cast-iron stomach. Not only can the stomach digest prey that’s bigger than the telescopefish itself, but it’s as dark as cast iron. That prevents the fish’s prey from getting revenge by attracting critters that might eat the telescopefish. There are two known species of telescopefish. Members of both species are small—no mor…

From poetry to music to movies, we’re always hearing about the “deep blue sea.” But the seas aren’t always deep blue. And sometimes, they’re not blue at all. They can be green, brown, or other colors. And each color can tell us something about what’s happening in that part of the sea. Understanding what the colors are telling us is one goal of PACE…

For the seagrass beds of southern Texas, rising sea level may be a case of give and take—or make that take and give. Higher waters are killing off some seagrass. But as the water rises even higher, newly submerged land has the potential to increase the total seagrass area. Seagrass is important for many coastal ecosystems. It can protect the coast …

The “beards” of marine mussels aren’t just a fashion statement. They anchor the mussels to the sea floor, attach to each other to form large “beds,” and hold out potential invaders. They’re also playing a role in materials research—scientists study the beards to learn how to make water-proof glue for many applications. The beards consist of a bundl…