Just as the sun came up, Emily Longman held up a map of boulders that were laid out in front of her—a rocky outcrop off of Second Sled Road in Dillon Beach. To her surprise, the map was still largely accurate, nearly eight decades later.
A mussel bed along Northern California’s Dillon Beach is as healthy and biodiverse as it was about 80 years ago, when two young students surveyed it shortly before Pearl Harbor was attacked and one was sent to fight in World War II.
Invisible in the clear afternoon sky, the moon tugged the tidal channel’s brackish waters towards the Pacific Ocean. It drew them out slowly, languidly, the water’s surface eddying and rippling in the sunlight.
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Hyoyoung Jeong envisions a future of skin-close wearables that capture a broader picture of health. Last year, he initiated a project with the Bodega Marine Laboratory.
Stressful childhoods can affect an individual’s adult years and influence future generations. Scientists at the University of California, Davis, found a similar pattern holds true for red abalone exposed as babies, and again as adults, to the stress of ocean acidification.
White abalone shells are magnificent structures. Translucent during the marine snail’s juvenile days, the extremely durable shell increases in opacity as the organism ages, gaining its paint-splatter-esque red, brown and white coloring from the algae it eats.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries biologists are pursuing urgent measures this fall to save some of the last remaining Central Valley spring-run Chinook salmon after the numbers returning from the ocean this year fell sharply toward extinction.
Beds of eelgrass (Zostera marina) form an important habitat in coastal regions throughout the northern hemisphere, crucial to many fish and other species and storing vast amounts of carbon. A new study published July 20 in Nature Plants shows that eelgrass spread around the world much more recently than previously thought, just under a quarter-million years ago. The results have implications for how eelgrass could be affected by a changing climate.