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.
September 2, 2020 By Michael Allen Hakai Magazine
A systematic review exposes the dangers of tiny plastics and the hidden bias at the heart of plastic research.
September 1, 2020 By Annie Roth The New York Times
The influx of whales to cleaner waters off New York City has meant that the number of them injured or killed there is on the rise.
August 31, 2020 By Kate Wheeling Hakai Magazine
In an ordinary year, Californians gather along the state’s beaches, parks, and waterways on the third Saturday of September to pick up trash before it can make its way into the Pacific. Every cigarette butt, bottle cap, and plastic bag in sight is collected and recorded, each a new point in a massive data set built over 35 years of coastal cleanups. Now, both the ecosystem and the data describing it are at risk.
August 31, 2020 By Hailey Branson-Potts Los Angeles Times
Crowds would normally be filling the aquarium corridors in these waning days of summer. But the aquarium on Cannery Row has been closed to the public for five months now because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Inside, it is quiet.