Articles

Most turtle-headed sea snakes throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans have black-and-white banded bodies—unless they swim in city waters. Instead of the distinctive white rings around their bodies, the snakes that live closest to industrial areas have much darker bodies. In fact, turtle-headed sea snakes in the polluted waters around New Caledonia, in the Pacific, are often entirely black. These city sea snakes aren’t making a fashion statement. Having darker skin, scientists have learned, gives them an edge over their banded brethren when living near large human populations.

Nemo may have been interested in exploring the great big ocean, but his dad Marlin’s attachment to their anemone is the norm for real clownfish. Sea anemones protect clownfish—and the eggs clownfish lay at the anemone’s base—against predators. But scientists recently learned that an anemone can only protect clownfish if the anemone itself remains healthy. When higher water temperatures stress anemones, clownfish fertility suffers.

New discoveries in the ocean never end, but sometimes even the ocean’s largest animals can evade scientists. It takes perseverance, a bit of luck and sometimes help from everyday people to find elusive new creatures. PhD student Marianne Nyegaard and a team of researchers from Murdoch University in Australia spent four years searching for a new species of sunfish, or mola, the largest bony fish in the world.

Living in near-total darkness requires some creative adaptations both to find food and avoid becoming food. For the red-colored strawberry squid, also called the cock-eyed squid, that creativity involves hundreds of tiny “strawberry seed” dots covering its body and a bizarrely mismatched pair of eyes. The “seeds” are actually tiny organs called photophores that emit light, or bioluminescence. The football-sized squid can use a camouflaging strategy of counter-illumination to avoid being seen from below.