The Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology (where I perform much of my research as a graduate student) is located on Coconut Island--or Moku o Loe, in the Hawaiian--in Kāne'ohe Bay on the island of O'ahu, HI. The island is surrounded by a wonderful fringing reef with a...
Imagine a wave, a giant wave, rushing inland toward you. Imagine it keeps coming, and coming without any end in sight. You're thinking of a tsunami. Now imagine the wave is more than 1000 ft high (300 m), enough to engulf the bottom 2/3 of the Empire State Building....
Check out this incredible snow sculpture by Fran Volz. You can see more of his work here.
In partnership with the Samoan people, NOAA has just announced the establishment of a new National Marine Sanctuary in American Samoa. Fagatele Bay in American Samoa had previously been established as a National Marine Sanctuary (one of only 14 such sanctuaries, along...
A few weeks ago the Hawaiian Islands were hit with a series of major storms. These caused substantial flooding in many parts of the state. For example, Lihue on the island of Kauai set a new rainfall record on May 5th of 8.64 in., obliterating the old record of 1.14...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMM4XYteqWI Education researchers at Oregon Sea Grant's Free-Choice Learning Lab, housed at Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center (HMSC), have discovered a way to translate octopus gestures to human speech. This...
For the Fishes is an advocacy group based here in Hawai'i that has been one of the leaders in the movement to ban fishing for the aquarium trade in the Hawaiian Islands. I recently had an exchange with For the Fishes on their facebook page which I hope adds...
Some organisms are able to reproduce asexually through fragmentation. A familiar example is most corals which you can slice, dice, and fricassee and still grow into separate colonies. While this is a common mode of reproduction for many branching corals in...
I'm a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and my dissertation work asks questions about how corals react to lower pH (associated with ocean acidification, OA) and higher temperature (associated with climate change). I'm one of several people here...
A team of scientists from Ohio State University, the University of Delaware, the University of Georgia, and professional aquarists at Reef Systems Coral Farm, Inc., are busy working to improve our understanding of how corals will react to global change. When one...