Category: Sea Life

Ocean Warming has Seafloor Species Headed in the Wrong Direction

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September 7, 2020 By Erik Stokstad Science Magazine
As the world warms, many species of plant and animal will have to find new—often cooler—places to live. But things are trickier for sedentary marine creatures like snails, worms, and clams, according to a new study. It finds that in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean, many species are spawning earlier in the year, when currents take their larvae southward and into warmer waters—the wrong direction. For some of them, including the sand dollars beloved by beachcombers, this means their range is shrinking.

Orca Tahlequah is a mother again

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September 5, 2020 By Lynda V. Mapes The Seattle Times
Mother orca Tahlequah has had her baby. The endangered southern resident killer whale, J35, touched hearts in the Pacific Northwest and around the world in August 2018 when she lost a calf that lived only a half-hour. She carried the calf for 17 days and 1,000 miles, refusing to let the calf go.

What A 1000-Year-Old Seal Skull Can Say About Climate Change

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September 2, 2020 By Abigail Eisenstadt Smithsonian Magazine
Once in a while, scientists re-discover an unusual specimen hidden on the shelves of a museum collection. This time, they found a cast of a skull from a Southern elephant seal, Mirounga leonina, which swam upriver to Indiana over 1000 years ago. The cast had been hidden in a drawer of the fossil marine mammals collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History since the 1970s.