Featured Research

A Mussel Bed is Full of Life, 80 Years Later

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.

In the Seagrass Meadows

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.

Genome Study Shows Recent Spread of Eelgrass

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.