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Spreading the word about conservation through memes. Coming to you from 2018.
Click through to read the entire tweet on Twitter.

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We made one pic.twitter.com/DQEEfiuo29
— Monterey Bay Aquarium (@MontereyAq) April 6, 2018

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Scroll through the twitter tag to learn more about Sea Otter Awareness

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Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.

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How do otter moms keep track of their kids?

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ICYMI, last week was #SeaOtterAwarenessWeek. Did you know that otter mothers wrap their babies in kelp to keep them from drifting away while they search for food?

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ICYMI, last week was #SeaOtterAwarenessWeek. Did you know that otter mothers wrap their babies in kelp to keep them from drifting away while they search for food? https://t.co/UzKCO3zjiC

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ICYMI, last week was #SeaOtterAwarenessWeek. Did you know that otter mothers wrap their babies in kelp to keep them from drifting away while they search for food? pic.twitter.com/UzKCO3zjiC
— Environment America (@EnvAm) September 28, 2021

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ICYMI, last week was #SeaOtterAwarenessWeek. Did you know that otter mothers wrap their babies in kelp to keep them from drifting away while they search for food? https://t.co/UzKCO3zjiC

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ICYMI, last week was #SeaOtterAwarenessWeek. Did you know that otter mothers wrap their babies in kelp to keep them from drifting away while they search for food? https://t.co/UzKCO3zjiC

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ICYMI, last week was #SeaOtterAwarenessWeek. Did you know that otter mothers wrap their babies in kelp to keep them from drifting away while they search for food?

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The sea otter population was reduced to just a few hundred due to the fur trades in the late 1800s. They have greatly rebounded and it's now estimated that 100,000 sea otters are in Alaskan waters, which is 90% of the world-wide population.
#seaotterawarenessweek
PC: Kaiti Grant

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The sea otter population was reduced to just a few hundred due to the fur trades in the late 1800s. They have greatly rebounded and it's now estimated that 100,000 sea otters are in Alaskan waters, which is 90% of the world-wide population.
#seaotterawarenessweek
PC: Kaiti Grant https://t.co/LNuoi3On1B

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The sea otter population was reduced to just a few hundred due to the fur trades in the late 1800s. They have greatly rebounded and it's now estimated that 100,000 sea otters are in Alaskan waters, which is 90% of the world-wide population.#seaotterawarenessweek
PC: Kaiti Grant pic.twitter.com/LNuoi3On1B
— Alaska SeaLife Center (@AlaskaSeaLife) September 23, 2021

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The sea otter population was reduced to just a few hundred due to the fur trades in the late 1800s. They have greatly rebounded and it's now estimated that 100,000 sea otters are in Alaskan waters, which is 90% of the world-wide population.
#seaotterawarenessweek
PC: Kaiti Grant https://t.co/LNuoi3On1B

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
The sea otter population was reduced to just a few hundred due to the fur trades in the late 1800s. They have greatly rebounded and it's now estimated that 100,000 sea otters are in Alaskan waters, which is 90% of the world-wide population.
#seaotterawarenessweek
PC: Kaiti Grant https://t.co/LNuoi3On1B

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The sea otter population was reduced to just a few hundred due to the fur trades in the late 1800s. They have greatly rebounded and it's now estimated that 100,000 sea otters are in Alaskan waters, which is 90% of the world-wide population.
#seaotterawarenessweek
PC: Kaiti Grant

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A study published by MBARI researchers and colleagues from @NMNH has revealed the effective, yet elegant, swimming behavior of gossamer worms in fine detail. @DanielsJoost @KakaniKatija @OsbornLab

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A study published by MBARI researchers and colleagues from @NMNH has revealed the effective, yet elegant, swimming behavior of gossamer worms in fine detail. @DanielsJoost @KakaniKatija @OsbornLab https://t.co/VQ3CjVXtDK

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A study published by MBARI researchers and colleagues from @NMNH has revealed the effective, yet elegant, swimming behavior of gossamer worms in fine detail. @DanielsJoost @KakaniKatija @OsbornLab pic.twitter.com/VQ3CjVXtDK
— MBARI (@MBARI_News) September 28, 2021

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A study published by MBARI researchers and colleagues from @NMNH has revealed the effective, yet elegant, swimming behavior of gossamer worms in fine detail. @DanielsJoost @KakaniKatija @OsbornLab https://t.co/VQ3CjVXtDK

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A study published by MBARI researchers and colleagues from @NMNH has revealed the effective, yet elegant, swimming behavior of gossamer worms in fine detail. @DanielsJoost @KakaniKatija @OsbornLab https://t.co/VQ3CjVXtDK

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A study published by MBARI researchers and colleagues from @NMNH has revealed the effective, yet elegant, swimming behavior of gossamer worms in fine detail. @DanielsJoost @KakaniKatija @OsbornLab

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Where the wild sharks swim

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Great White Sharks Swimming Through Kelp Forests In South Africa!

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Creative ways to Fitbit a Shark

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A Fitbit For White Sharks: The Blubber Burrito!

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White Shark Conservation Project

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Project White Shark — The Farallon Islands

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Sea Otters in Elkhorn Slough: A Conservation Success Story

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MBARI - Researchers discover carnivorous sponges . . .

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MBARI - Researchers discover carnivorous sponges . . .

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In 2017, MBARI researchers were using a remotely controlled robot to explore the dark depths 4,000 meters (13,100 feet) beneath the sea surface when they came upon an animal that looked like a small stalk with a white blob on top, trailing hair-like filaments, and anchored by root-like structures in the muddy seafloor. After bringing the animal up to the surface, the researchers dimmed the lights in their laboratory and gently touched it. The animal emitted an eerie blue-green glow. The scientists were surprised and delighted-they had found a luminous deep-sea sponge.

"When we sampled the first sponge, the team was actually looking at another animal on it (a benthic ctenophore). The sponge was left in the sampler after everybody picked animals of interest. I was working on the benthic list of bioluminescent organisms at that time and tested everything I could. I decided to try this one; we had no idea what it was at that time. When I stimulated it, it was clearly bright and lasting for several seconds. I stimulated it several times on different parts before talking about it to the rest of the team," said Séverine Martini, lead author of the study and researcher at the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography, Marseille, France.

Although many deep-sea animals are known to glow, sponges have long been considered an exception. Over the past 100 years, a few marine biologists have found sponges that appeared to be luminous, but it turned out that the sponges in question contained glowing bacteria or had consumed or been colonized by other animals that glowed.

The MBARI researchers, led by former MBARI Postdoctoral Fellow Séverine Martini and University of California, Santa Cruz, graduate research assistant Darrin Schultz, recently published a paper about their discovery of glowing sponges in Frontiers in Marine Science. Working with MBARI marine biologists Lonny Lundsten and Steve Haddock, they showed not only that the deep-sea sponges glowed but that they contained the chemicals necessary to make light within their bodies.

A surprisingly large number of deep-sea animals gain the chemicals required to emit light by consuming other glowing organisms. The researchers found evidence that this sponge used coelenterazine to make its light-the same molecule used by a broad diversity of marine organisms from jellyfish to squid.

"This finding is pretty spectacular evolutionarily in that we don't know of any other sponge that has been shown to use coelenterazine, let alone clearly shown to be bioluminescent. This means that the sponges either evolutionarily co-opted one of their enzymes to function as a bioluminescent protein, acquired the ability to bioluminesce by gathering the chemicals and enzymes through their food, or acquired the genes from another organism long ago during their speciation," said Schultz.

The glowing sponges are members of a new species and haven't even been named yet. MBARI researchers had observed them living on the deep muddy seafloor for decades but had never collected and studied them until recently.

Between 2017 and 2019, the team used MBARI's remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Doc Ricketts to collect six of the undescribed sponges from a research site about 200 kilometers (over 100 miles) offshore of the Central California coast. The cameras on the robot were not sensitive enough to detect any light coming from the sponges. Still, after Martini's surprising discovery in the darkened laboratory on board the ship, she was able to document the reaction using a special low-light video camera.

As the researchers wrote of their discovery, "After gently touching each individual sponge with a gloved hand or round-pointed forceps, we observed blue-green bioluminescence localized around the point of mechanical depression. The light lasted for five to ten seconds and was easily visible to the naked eye. The mass at the top of the sponge, its filaments, and its stalk all glowed when touched, but the root-like rhizoids did not."

The researchers also exposed the sponge's tissue to various chemicals to see how these would affect the sponge's ability to glow and test that the light was not caused by bacteria or other animals living within the sponge's tissues. In their paper, the scientists note they won't be able to say for certain that the sponges produce their own light until they can search the sponges' genes for signs of bioluminescence-related proteins.

"After Séverine identified that the sponges were bioluminescent, it took us several years and three research expeditions to piece together what was going on biochemically. During each cruise, we could only collect two or three sponges, and I ran each sponge through various biochemical tests to learn more about its bioluminescence. In the end, all of the evidence pointed toward the sponge not using a bacterial symbiont for bioluminescence but using chemicals and enzymes from its own cells to produce light. In the future, we will determine if the genes required for bioluminescence are encoded in the sponge genome, and will use that information to learn more about how this species evolved the ability to make its own light," said Schultz.

Based on DNA sequencing, the researchers identified the sponge as a new species closely related to other carnivorous deep-sea sponges. In fact, this type of sponge, though unnamed, seems to be relatively common, albeit at the crushing depth of 4,000 meters (13,100 feet). Data from MBARI's 30-year database of ROV observations suggest that MBARI researchers have seen similar sponges on the seafloor, from the Canadian Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico, and even around the Hawaiian Islands.

One big, but as yet unanswered, question is how the sponges benefit from creating their own light. The fact that the new sponges only glow when physically disturbed suggests that the glow might serve to distract or discourage predators. However, another possibility is that the sponges might glow to attract prey. Most sponges pump water through their bodies and filter out tiny particles for food. But in some parts of the deep sea where drifting particles are scarce, many deep-sea sponges (including close relatives of the newly discovered glowing sponge) have evolved into carnivores, capturing small animals on tiny, needle-like hooks.

This discovery gives us another glimpse into the strange inhabitants of the deep sea and their adaptations to this unique but vast and virtually unexplored habitat.
Original journal article:
Martini, S., Schultz, D.T., Lundsten, L., and S.H.D. Haddock (2020). Bioluminescence in an Undescribed Species of Carnivorous Sponge (Cladorhizidae) From the Deep Sea. Frontiers in Marine Science, DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2020.576476

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Researchers discover carnivorous sponges that make their own light

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In 2017, MBARI researchers were using a remotely controlled robot to explore the dark depths 4,000 meters (13,100 feet) beneath the sea surface when they came upon an animal that looked like a small stalk with a white blob on top, trailing hair-like filaments, and anchored by root-like structures in the muddy seafloor.

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Monitoring ocean acidification in the coastal ocean

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November 17, 2020 - Underwater gliders carrying pH sensors can monitor ocean acidification over large areas and long periods of time.

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In the pitch-black environment of the deep sea, light is a precious thing. In fact, making light is essential for the survival of many deep-sea animals. At least nine major groups of deep-sea animals, including jellies, corals, brittle stars, squids, and fish, use the same light-emitting chemical, coelenterazine, to power their displays. Surprisingly, many of these animals can't actually produce coelenterazine, but must get it by eating other glowing animals.

A new research paper shows that at least two species of comb jellies (ctenophores) are able to make coelenterazine inside their bodies, and thus could provide a source of this chemical for many other denizens of the deep. This discovery will not only help researchers understand the detailed biochemical processes that animals use to create light, but could also provide a new tool for biomedical research.

Because each molecule of coelenterazine can only react once to make light, the chemical is rapidly used up each time an animal glows. This means that the animal must continually replenish its supply of coelenterazine if it wants to keep lighting up.

Even crystal jellies, the animals in which coelenterazine was first identified, do not make their own coelenterazine, but get it by eating copepods and other crustaceans.

Previously, the only marine animals confirmed to make their own coelenterazine were the open-ocean copepod Metridia pacifica and the deep-sea shrimp Systellaspis debilis. Because these animals are not easily available for study and no one has figured out how to grow them in the lab, scientists still don't know exactly how these animals produce the compound.

Now, in a recent paper, former MBARI Postdoctoral Fellow Manabu Bessho-Uehara, MBARI marine biologist Steve Haddock, and other researchers demonstrated that at least two species of comb jellies ( Bolinopsis infundibulum and Mnemiopsis leidyi) can also make their own coelenterazine.

In order to prove that these comb jellies do not have to get this chemical from their food, the researchers worked with aquarist Wyatt Patry at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and biologist William Browne at the University of Miami, who managed to get these animals to grow and reproduce in captivity.

The researchers raised several generations of comb jellies, feeding them only organisms that did not contain coelenterazine. Even without coelenterazine in their food supply, the comb jellies maintained their ability to glow, and the researchers were able to detect coelenterazine within their bodies. Haddock noted, "Manabu's experiments gave some of the clearest and most compelling results of any research that I've been involved with."

Looking at a "family tree" highlighting different types of glowing animals, the researchers could tell that the glowing comb jellies, copepods, and shrimp all evolved the ability to produce coelenterazine independently of one another. This shows, once again, how important bioluminescence is for many marine animals.

From an ecological perspective, these findings are significant because they show that the glowing comb jellies could provide coelenterazine to the many other deep-sea animals that eat them.

This research could also have applications outside the realm of marine biology. Because these comb jellies can be successfully grown in captivity, and scientists have already sequenced the genome of Mnemiopsis leidyi, the researchers suggest that this species could be used as a "model animal" to study bioluminescence and coelenterazine production.

"We really want to figure out the genes involved in making this molecule," said Haddock. "It would tell us so much about the evolution of bioluminescence, and could usher in a new generation of biotech tools. Turning these fragile jellies into 'lab rats' has enabled experiments that we could never have done a few years ago. I am hopeful this will be the key to solving the mysterious origins of bioluminescence."

From a practical perspective, if researchers can figure out the exact biochemical processes by which comb jellies produce coelenterazine, they might be able to replicate this process in the laboratory to produce new types of glowing compounds. Such compounds are used extensively in modern biomedical, biochemical, and genomic research, for example, for tracing tumor-forming cells.

"The building blocks of coelenterazine are some of the same amino acids that are found in all living organisms, including humans," explained Bessho-Uehara. "If we can introduce the genes that produce coelenterazine into living cells of other organisms, we can make parts of these cells glow. This would help us understand how the cells behave, develop, and respond to changing conditions. Such technology would light up the life sciences by overcoming some of the difficulties that we have with current glowing compounds."
Original journal article:
Bessho-Uehara, M., Huang, W., Patry, W.L., Browne, W.E., Weng, J., and S.D.H. Haddock (2020). Evidence for de novo biosynthesis of the luminous substrate coelenterazine in ctenophores. iScience! DIO: doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2020.101859

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Glow your own: Comb jellies make their own glowing compounds instead of getting them from food

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In the pitch-black environment of the deep sea, light is a precious thing. In fact, making light is essential for the survival of many deep-sea animals. At least nine major groups of deep-sea animals, including jellies, corals, brittle stars, squids, and fish, use the same light-emitting chemical, coelenterazine, to power their displays.

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MBARI - Listening to an underwater eruption

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MBARI - Listening to an underwater eruption

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Though we rarely hear them at the sea surface, underwater volcanoes make a variety of sounds when they erupt, from short, sharp cracks to booming explosions and low rumbles. Geologists aren't sure exactly what causes all these different sounds. But a new paper shows how scientists can use these sounds to study the details of underwater eruptions on a day-to-day basis.

In studying any eruption, volcanologists are particularly interested in where, when, how much, and how fast lava emerges from the volcano. This helps them understand how that particular volcano works and how it might behave in the future-something that can be especially useful for eruptions that could affect human activities.

Unlike recent eruptions on the Island of Hawaii, where volcanologists were able to map the progression of lava using helicopters and drones, undersea eruptions are much more difficult to study. Most active underwater volcanoes are hundreds of kilometers from shore and thousands of meters below the sea surface. Research cruises to study these eruptions typically take place months or years after the eruption, so geologists have to act like detectives looking for clues at the scene of a crime.

Axial Seamount, an active volcano off the Pacific Northwest, is an exception. Not only is it the most active underwater volcano known, with documented eruptions in 1998, 2011, and 2015, but it is also the most heavily instrumented underwater volcano in the world. Dozens of instruments have been installed on the seafloor around the volcano, including earthquake-monitoring stations, tiltmeters, pressure sensors, and hydrophones. Many of these instruments are connected to shore through seafloor cables as part of a network called the Ocean Observatories Initiative Regional Cabled Array.

Among the many instruments at Axial Seamount are two broadband hydrophones (underwater microphones), which recorded all the different sounds produced during a month-long eruption at Axial Seamount in 2015.

Former MBARI Postdoctoral Fellow Morgane Le Saout combined data from these hydrophones with extremely detailed maps of the seafloor to determine where and when eruptions and lava flows occurred during the 2015 event.

The seafloor maps were based on data gathered by underwater robots ( autonomous underwater vehicles) operated by MBARI and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The maps showed individual lava flows and formations as small as one meter across. Using these detailed maps, the researchers could tell exactly where individual eruptions occurred.

The hydrophone data allowed the researchers to determine precisely when explosive sounds occurred and roughly where these sounds were coming from. By comparing the timing and locations of 22,000 recorded explosions with the mapped locations of the lava flows, Le Saout and her fellow researchers were able to correlate specific groups of explosions with specific lava flows. This allowed them to figure out exactly when each lava flow occurred and how each flow evolved over time.

"Such results are not easy to obtain," noted Le Saout. "As on land, underwater eruptions happen infrequently, and most underwater volcanoes are too far from coastal regions to be heavily instrumented and mapped."

The authors think that most of these explosive sounds were created when lava as hot as 1,200 degrees Celsius (2,200 degrees Fahrenheit) interacted with near-freezing seawater. The resulting steam explosions could be large or small, depending on the geologic context.

The largest explosions occurred when hard crusts formed on top of preexisting lava flows. Additional lava filling in beneath these crusts caused the seafloor to bulge upward, forming mounds up to 30 meters (100 feet) high. As these mounds expanded, the crusts cracked, allowing seawater to come in contact with molten lava, resulting in violent steam explosions.

During the 2015 eruption, the hydrophones recorded tens of thousands of explosions that geologists were able to correlate with the formation of individual lava mounds. They were also able to figure out the exact timing of flows from different "extrusion centers" on each mound, when lava broke through the crust and flowed out of the seafloor.

Smaller explosions occurred as these lava flows advanced across the seafloor, trapping small amounts of water under the leading edge of the flow. By tracking the changing locations of these smaller explosions over time, Le Saout and her co-authors were able to track the advance and growth of individual lava flows as they moved away from their extrusion centers.

During their analysis, the researchers noticed that these two different types of sounds (large and small explosions) seemed to alternate with each other. This suggests a cycle in which lava mounds first inflated at an extrusion center and then cracked, releasing new lava lobes that flowed away from the area. The authors suggest that this repeating process formed distinctive lava patterns on the seafloor, which they call "hummocky lobes."

By comparing the duration of each eruption (from the hydrophone data) with the volume of each flow (from the mapping data), the researchers were also able to estimate how rapidly lava flowed from each extrusion center-up to 45 cubic meters (almost 12,000 gallons-or a medium-sized backyard swimming pool) per second.

The fact that researchers were able to make such detailed descriptions of individual lava flows is particularly impressive when you consider that the eruption lasted an entire month and took place 1,700 meters (about 5,600 feet) below the sea surface and almost 500 kilometers (300 miles) offshore.

"Mapping and acoustic data have been combined previously to look at the emplacement of lava flows," explained MBARI volcanologist and coauthor Dave Clague. "But Morgane had much better mapping data and better locations of the sounds, which combined to make a really nice detailed story of how the flows were emplaced."

Reflecting on this work, Le Saout said, "This combined method provides new insight into how underwater eruptions evolve in time and space. We hope that such information can be used as a basis to understand past and future eruptions in other underwater volcanic areas."

Article by Kim Fulton-Bennett
Original journal article:
Le Saout, M., D. R. Bohnenstiehl, J. B. Paduan, D. A. Clague, Quantification of Eruption Dynamics on the North Rift at Axial Seamount, Juan de Fuca Ridge, Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GC009136 (Posted on line August 2, 2020).

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Though we rarely hear them at the sea surface, underwater volcanoes make a variety of sounds when they erupt, from short, sharp cracks to booming explosions and low rumbles. Geologists aren't sure exactly what causes all these different sounds. But a new paper shows how scientists can use these sounds to study the details of underwater eruptions on a day-to-day basis.