“As the ocean continues to warm, understanding how symbionts and environmental factors affect coral growth and health will help predict reef futures and inform conservation interventions where coral stocks are selected for specific traits or symbionts,” said Shayle Matsuda, a doctoral student at the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the time of the research.

The study was co-led by Matsuda, now a postdoctoral fellow at the Shedd Aquarium, and Mariah Opalek, who conducted the experiment for her undergraduate thesis at UH Mānoa. The research team investigated whether rice corals hosting symbiotic algae that can tolerate warmer water may grow more slowly, which could impact survivorship and competition for space on the reef, compared to coral hosting symbionts that are more susceptible to bleaching when ocean waters warm.

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The reef-dwelling species can endure roughly two hours without any oxygen at all.

But you don’t have to move inland just yet – these rare creatures survive on worms, small fish, and crustaceans, not humans.

What are walking sharks and where do they live?

Epaulette sharks live in reef flats around Australia’s Southern Great Barrier Reef, a habitat that can become completely isolated by the outgoing tide. Other species of walking shark can be found around Australia, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea.

When the tide changes, sharks can become trapped in shallow rock pools. To survive, the species evolved to cope without oxygen for up to two hours – and to move with its fins in a crawling motion.

This “breaks all the rules of survival”, a statement from Florida Atlantic University declared.

Scientists there are investigating how walking and swimming abilities change in an epaulette shark’s early development.

When newly hatched, they survive from an internalized yolk sac, whereas slightly older juvenile sharks forage for their own food.

The yolk gives the newborns a bulging belly. But scientists found that body shape made little difference to how fast they could move.

“Studying epaulette shark locomotion allows us to understand this species’- and perhaps related species’- ability to move within and away from challenging conditions in their habitats,” said Dr. Marianne E. Porter, senior author of the study.

The sharks use their walking abilities to “manoeuvre into small reef crevices to avoid aerial and aquatic predators,” she said. This is also how they forage for prey.

The shark’s walking capabilities are linked to “challenging environmental conditions.”

Dr Porter is now calling for further investigation into how climate change will alter these conditions in the future.

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Plastic pollution: we all know it’s a problem. In 2015, we produced almost 450 million tons of plastic, with that number expected to double by 2050.

Think that it’s all managed? Think again: less than 10% is recycled. And every year more than 8 million tons make their way into our oceans.

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The Antarctic Peninsula has shown some of the largest global increases in near-surface air temperature over the last 50 years, but experts have struggled to predict temperatures because little was known about how natural aerosols and clouds affect the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth and energy radiated back into space.

Studying data from seas around the Peninsula, experts have discovered that most new particles are formed in air masses arriving from the partially ice-covered Weddell Sea—a significant source of the sulphur gases and alkylamines responsible for ‘seeding’ the particles.

A new study shows that increased concentrations of sulphuric acid and alkylamines are essential for the formation of new particles around the northern Antarctic Peninsula. High concentrations of other acids and oxygenated organics coincided with high levels of sulphuric acid, but by themselves did not lead to measurable particle formation and growth.

An international team of researchers from the University of Birmingham; Institute of Marine Science, Barcelona, Spain; and King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia studied summertime open ocean and coastal new particle formation in the region, based on data from ship and land stations, and today published its findings in Nature Geoscience.

The researchers revealed that the newly discovered pathway is more efficient than the ion-induced sulphuric acid-ammonia pathway previously observed in Antarctica and can occur rapidly under neutral conditions.

Study co-author Roy Harrison OBE, Professor of Environmental Health at the University of Birmingham, commented: “New particle formation is globally one of the major sources of aerosol particles and cloud condensation nuclei. This previously overlooked pathway to natural aerosol formation could prove a key tool in predicting the future climate of polar regions.

“The key to unlocking Antarctica’s climate change lies in examining particles created in the atmosphere by the chemical reaction of gases. These particles start tiny and grow bigger, becoming cloud condensation nuclei leading to more reflective clouds which direct outgoing terrestrial radiation back to earth and warm the lower atmosphere.”

New particle formation is globally one of the major sources of aerosol particles and cloud condensation nuclei. Existing research suggests that natural aerosols contribute disproportionately to global warming, whilst sulphuric acid is thought to be responsible for most aerosol seeding observed in the atmosphere.

The research team identified numerous sulphuric acid-amine cluster peaks during new particle formation events—providing evidence that alkylamines provided the basis for sulphuric acid nucleation.

“We found that sulphuric acid-amine-water nucleation is a dominant process in the Antarctic Peninsula, with the amines coming from regions of sea ice in the Antarctic Peninsula-western Weddell Sea region,” added Professor Harrison. “Waters in this region with significant amounts of sea ice are rich in amines, and aerosols originating from such regions show a near five-fold enhancement in amine concentrations.”

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