Oceanus

The words "coral reefs" conjure up images of a tropical paradise: shallow, warm, aquamarine waters, bright sunlight, white sand, and colorful, darting fish. But corals also live deep in the sea, in regions where the sun doesn't penetrate and water...

Closing parts of the ocean to fishing to preserve fish stocks holds great intuitive appeal. Similar resource management tools have been used as far back as the Middle Ages, when European kings and princes controlled access to forests and streams, and...

On summer nights, if you sit quietly at the edge of a field or watch the edges of the light pools around street lamps, you will see bats swooping through shadowy darkness in search of moths or other flying prey. They detect and catch their targets...

Capped with a formidable ice and snow cover, plunged into total darkness during the winter, buffeted by blizzard winds, and bitterly cold, the Arctic Ocean is one of the most inaccessible and yet beautiful environments on Earth. Life here endures some...

The challenge of designing a device to learn what marine mammals do on dives is the stuff of dreams for an electronics engineer. In the spring of 1999, the time was right to build the digital acoustic recording tag, or D-tag--an instrument to record...

Whales are among the most elusive animals that humans have ever hunted. Pursuing whales across the seas and centuries, whalers made careful observations of whale behavior whenever and wherever they surfaced. But sperm whales, for example, spend about...

In science, the key to understanding any situation is careful observations and measurements. The key to observing and measuring, however, is being there--in the moment--and that has always proved challenging for oceanographers. It is difficult and...

At the helm of the Endeavor, James Cook set sail from England in 1768. He rounded Cape Horn in January 1769, entering the vast, unexplored Pacific and Southern Oceans and opening up an entirely new vista on the world. Cook "added a hemisphere" to...

For decades, the Nassau grouper (Epinephelus striatus) was one of the most sought-after fish species in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, from the Bahamas to Central America. These large, delicious fish live among coral reefs and have a breeding behavior...

For millions of years, the North Atlantic Ocean has been home to right whales. In winter, they gave birth to calves off the shores of West Africa in the eastern Atlantic and off Florida and Georgia in the western Atlantic. In the spring, they migrated...