On her first day of graduate school, Karolina Zabinski rose at 4:00am. She spent the day on the muddy shores of Tomales Bay, collecting eelgrass for a survey of aquatic plant diseases. These ribbon-like seagrasses are common along the California coast and form knee-high meadows that undulate in the water.
Why are there so many species of coral reef fish? According to a new study, it’s because about 50 million years ago, some fish figured out how to bite food from hard surfaces.
Conducting environmental science in a time of rapid climate change can be like a game of Whac-a-Mole. Just as you get close, the focus moves, burns, melts or disappears.
Rarotonga, the largest island in the archipelago of the Cook Islands, is protected by a coral reef that forms a barricade around the kidney-shaped dollop of terra firma moored in the middle of the South Pacific. If that reef were to die off or disappear—as reefs are, globally, at a disheartening rate—it would spell catastrophe for Rarotonga’s more than 10,000 inhabitants. That partly explains how Anya Brown came to be a regular at a hardware store on the island.
California’s Bay Area may be a culinary hot spot for people, but food options for fish in the San Francisco Estuary have been limited and declining in recent decades. A study from the University of California, Davis, shows there is a part of the estuary that is teeming with fish food — the managed wetlands of Suisun Marsh.
Seven weaned elephant seal pups in California’s Año Nuevo State Park tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Veterinary Services Laboratory confirmed Tuesday evening.
Coral reefs make up less than 1% of ocean habitat but are home to at least 25% of marine species. These incredibly biodiverse ecosystems are increasingly threatened by human actions, including anthropogenic climate change.
When oceanographer Tessa Hill was asked to join the Climate Crisis Advisory Group (CCAG) as an advisor, she was surprised by the reason. The global group, formed in 2021 with the vision of acting as a bridge between the latest climate science and policymakers, was interested in Hill’s background expertise in methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
We’re excited to share that Andrea C. Alfaro has been appointed as the new director of the UC Davis Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute (CMSI), effective January 1, 2026.
As global emissions continue to climb, there is a growing call for rapidly reducing methane. UC Davis Professor Tessa Hill spoke about the benefits that can come from fast action on methane with the hosts of We Don’t Have Time during this year’s Climate Week NYC, held Sept 21-28. She was joined by Fatima Denton, director of the United Nations University-Institute for Natural Resources in Africa.
