Saving Seafood

Scientists turn underwater gardeners to save precious marine plant

February 3, 2022 — Whoever said there’s nothing more boring than watching grass grow wasn’t thinking about seagrass. Often confused with seaweeds and rarely receiving the attention they deserve, there’s nothing boring about seagrasses. In fact, they are one of the most productive ecosystems in the world.

Next time you are swimming and enjoying the sea’s cool embrace look down and try to spot the slender blades of seagrass, a remarkable marine plant that plays a vital role in the coastal environment but is now under threat.

Forming dense underwater meadows, seagrasses are vital to maintain fisheries, absorb carbon and protect coastlines from erosion—but their future is threatened by , pollution and other impacts of human activities, scientists say.

The plants grow in shallow coastal waters in all regions except the Antarctic. They act as nurseries or feeding grounds for hundreds of species of seafood, including sea bream, octopus, cuttlefish and Alaska pollock—one of the most fished species in the world.

Read the full story at Phys.org

Figuring Out When and Why Squids Lost Their Shells

March 7, 2017 — Shaped like a torpedo and about as swift, squids are jet-propelled underwater predators. Together with their nimble brethren, the octopus and cuttlefish, they make for an agile invertebrate armada.

But that was not always the case. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the ancestors of the tentacled trio were slow, heavily armored creatures, like the coil-shelled ammonites and the cone-shelled belemnites.

Alastair Tanner, a doctoral student at University of Bristol in England, wanted to better understand why those cephalopods lost their shells. But though both ammonites and the belemnites have left behind rich fossil records, their shell-less descendants have not.

So Mr. Tanner conducted a genetic analysis of 26 present day cephalopods, including the vampire squid, the golden cuttlefish and the southern blue-ringed octopus.

Read the full story at the New York Times

Squid Are Thriving While Fish Decline

May 24, 2016 — The squids are all right — as are their cephalopod cousins the cuttlefish and octopus.

In the same waters where fish have faced serious declines, the tentacled trio is thriving, according to a study published Monday.

“Cephalopods have increased in the world’s oceans over the last six decades,” Zoë Doubleday, a marine ecologist from the University of Adelaide in Australia, and lead author of the study, said in an email. “Our results suggest that something is going on in the marine environment on a large scale, which is advantageous to cephalopods.”

Read the full story at the New York Times