Radio Program

Our regular Science and the SeaTM radio program presents marine science topics in an engaging two-minute story format. Our script writers gather ideas for the radio program from the University of Texas Marine Science Institute's researchers and from our very popular college class, Introduction to Oceanography, which we teach to hundreds of non-science majors at The University of Texas at Austin every year. Our radio programs are distributed at to commercial and public radio stations across the country.

October 29, 2023

Lots of people pay good money for exfoliation treatments—removing their dead skin. But some humpback whales take care of their own treatments. They strip away dead skin and parasites by rolling in the sand on the sea floor.

Scientists discovered the spa treatments when they studied three humpback whales, in 2021 and ’22. They attached instrument packages to the backs of the whales. The packages included high-def video cameras and sensors to record depth, temperature, and other conditions. After a few hours, the packages released and bobbed to the surface.

October 22, 2023

A tropical storm doesn’t have to be big to have a big impact. In 2019, for example, a hundred thousand square miles of the Coral Sea, east of Australia, turned green after the passage of Tropical Cyclone Oma. The storm’s winds topped out at just 80 miles per hour—the equivalent of a category one hurricane. Yet it lingered over the same patch of ocean for days. When it dissipated, the ocean was much greener—the result of a massive “bloom” of tiny organisms known as phytoplankton.

October 15, 2023

Salt marshes are defenders. They protect the coast against erosion and storm surges. They store carbon, which helps limit global warming. And they provide habitat for fish, shellfish, and birds.

Yet the marshes could use their own defenders. They’re disappearing—the result of rising sea level and coastal development. And a recent study says that more than 90 percent of them could disappear by the end of the century.

October 8, 2023

The slender snipe eel doesn’t look like a fish at all. Instead, it looks like a long shoelace attached to the head and beak of a skinny duck. But that shoelace is bony, because the eel’s backbone has more vertebrae than any other animal on Earth—an average of about 750.

Slender snipe eels are one of nine species of snipe eels, which are found in warmer waters all around the planet. They live in the open ocean, away from land. Most are found at depths of 1,000 to 2,000 feet, but some have been recorded more than two miles deep.

October 1, 2023

One Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Harvey is a disaster. But having two such hurricanes hit the same area within a few weeks of each other is catastrophic. Coastal infrastructure is demolished, hundreds of thousands are left homeless, and it takes years for the region to recover.

Until recently, the odds of back-to-back storms have been small. But a recent study says that our changing climate appears to be boosting those chances. Some regions of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the U.S. could see double hits as often as every three years.

September 24, 2023

For decades, whales in the Pacific Northwest were declining. Year after year, the populations kept getting smaller. In recent years, though, many of the whales have been coming back. Thanks to conservation efforts and legal protections, the numbers recorded by whale-watching organizations have been going up. In 2022, they even set some records.

Groups monitor populations in the Salish Sea—a narrow band that hugs the coast from central Washington to southern British Columbia. They add up eyewitness reports from commercial whale watchers and others.

September 17, 2023

The two largest ice sheets on Earth sit atop Antarctica and Greenland. But they’re both getting smaller in a hurry. They’re contributing to the rise in global sea level—about an inch over the past few decades. The rate at which the sheets vanish isn’t the same, though—Greenland’s is disappearing much faster.

The ice sheets can be hundreds of feet thick. But as the climate has warmed up, they’ve been shrinking. According to one study, from 1992 to 2020 they lost a combined eight trillion tons of ice, with Greenland contributing more than half of the total.

September 10, 2023

Young sharks of several threatened species are living together in a “nursery” off the western tip of Africa. It’s one of the busiest nurseries in the Atlantic Ocean.

From 2016 to 2019, researchers counted the sharks found in fishing nets around Cabo Verde, a group of small volcanic islands about 350 miles west of Africa. They also interviewed most of the fishermen in the region to see where young sharks were most common. And one spot was by far the most popular: Sal Rei Bay, on the coast of Boa Vista Island.

September 3, 2023

Oil and gas bubble up through the ocean floor all the time. They form oil slicks, create tar balls that wash up on shore, and make pillows of methane ice. And in some rare instances, they form asphalt volcanoes—tall, black mounds with smooth sides.

The first were discovered in 2003, about two miles deep in the Gulf of Mexico. Others have been found in the Gulf since then, along with a few off the coasts of California and western Africa. Some of those in the Gulf of Mexico have split apart, creating shapes that look like the fronds of a palm lily, so they’re called tar lilies.

August 27, 2023
Image of a wolf with a sea otter pup in it's mouth.

Good news for one species isn’t necessarily good news for all. Consider the wildlife on Pleasant Island, off the coast of southeastern Alaska. Sea otters returned to the island a couple of decades ago. Gray wolves came along a decade later. The wolves ate most of the island’s deer, then started hunting the otters. That’s good for the wolves, but bad news for everyone else.

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