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.
When a loggerhead turtle crawls off the Florida beach for the first time, it’s only a few inches long, and momma doesn’t stick around to guide it out to sea. Yet after a decade or more looping around the Atlantic Ocean, all the way to Africa or Europe and back, the turtle returns to the same nesting area where it hatched.
It’s been a rough few decades for Chesapeake Bay. Urban development and agriculture have taken away wetlands and polluted the waters. Invasive species have damaged the wetlands even more, and overcome some of the native species. And things may not get much better in the decades ahead, thanks to the rapid rise in sea level.
Not only is the water itself rising, but the land around the Chesapeake is sinking. The combined relative rise in sea level is up to two-tenths of an inch per year, and it’s expected to increase in the decades ahead.
Over the next few decades, some of the country’s most expensive property is likely to either get a lot more expensive, or to disappear beneath the waves — a victim of rising sea level.
Sea level is rising as a result of Earth’s warming climate. Higher temperatures melt the glaciers in Greenland, the Antarctic, and elsewhere, adding more water to the oceans. And as the oceans get warmer, the water expands, boosting sea level even more. Sea level increased by about six to eight inches during the 20th Century, with rises of several feet predicted for this century.
Individually, nutria are pretty inoffensive little creatures. They look like scruffy beavers with skinny tails, and they can even be domesticated.
But get a bunch of them together and it’s another story. Nutria can destroy marshes and wetlands, stripping acre after acre of grasses that protect the coastline from erosion and provide habitat for shellfish, birds, and other creatures. In fact, they’ve been doing that in the United States for three-quarters of a century.
Build it and they will come — fish, that is. Sink just about any big structure in the ocean and fish, crustaceans, and other marine life will flock to it. That rule seems to apply to wind-power turbines as well. Several studies in Europe show that reef systems develop on the bases of submerged turbines in a hurry.
The United States hasn’t built any offshore wind farms yet, although several are in the early stages of development. A government study said that offshore wind farms could provide as much electricity as all our current energy sources combined.
Penguins are some of the most adorable creatures on Earth. But some penguins that lived in New Zealand more than 25 million years ago also would have been a little bit scary — they were big enough to almost see eye-to-eye with a person.
People ranch just about anything these days, from llamas to emus. And the roundups aren’t limited to the land — some of them take place in the sea. One example is the sea urchin — a small, spiny creature found in much of the world. But natural stocks have been dwindling, so urchin are being raised in captivity — in tanks, cages, and undersea ranches.
The sea urchin is especially popular in Japan, where the roe — its reproductive organs — are a delicacy. In fact, Japan imports most of the world’s production of sea urchin.
Exploring the deep ocean is like exploring another world — it’s a realm unlike anything on dry land. In recent years, though, marine scientists have been taking the “other-world” concept to extremes — they’re working with astronomers and planetary scientists to study oceans on other planets and moons.
The best example is on Europa, one of the largest moons of Jupiter. Its icy crust appears to hide a global ocean — one that holds more liquid water than all of Earth’s oceans combined. That makes Europa a possible habitat for life.
Fishing is all about deception – convincing a gullible fish that the lure is really a tasty treat. That’s the case whether the angler is a human or another fish an anglerfish. The anglerfish is probably one of the ugliest creatures on the planet, but it’s also one of the most interesting. In some of its more than 200 species, for example, the male becomes a small parasite. It attaches itself to a female, then loses its vision and even its ability to move. It feeds off the female, and its only job is to fertilize her eggs.
A high-tech sentry is keeping an eye on the Texas coast, providing an early warning of dangerous invaders. And it may already have saved lives.
The sentry is known as the Imaging Flow Cytobot. Its quarry are microscopic organisms, known as phytoplankton, that cause red tides and other harmful outbreaks. They produce toxins that can kill the fish that eat them. The toxins can also build up in the bodies of oysters and other shellfish, making them harmful to anything that eats them -- including people.
