Science and the Sea podcast

By The University of Texas Marine Science Institute

Natural Sciences Science & Medicine

What's Science and the Sea podcast about?

The goal of Science and the Sea is to convey an understanding of the sea and its myriad life forms to everyone, so that they, too, can fully appreciate this amazing resource.

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Nurdle Patrol

03.29.2020

A “nurdle” sounds like a character from a children’s TV show. And if you look at one, it seems just about as harmless. But these tiny plastic beads can cause big problems for marine life. “Nurdle” is a nickname for ...

Science and the Sea podcast episodes:

03.29.2020 Nurdle Patrol A “nurdle” sounds like a character from a children’s TV show. And if you look at one, it seems just about as harmless. But these tiny plastic beads can cause big problems for marine life. “Nurdle” is a nickname for ...
03.22.2020 Green Volcano When a volcano began erupting on the island of Hawaii in May of 2018, satellites kept a close eye on it. Just three days after the lava flow hit the ocean, for example, they saw that the water was turning ...
03.15.2020 First Submarine Hundreds of submarines glide through the world’s oceans. Most of them are military, but some sail for science. They measure temperatures and currents, sample the water, map the sea floor, and perform other tasks -- revealing the secrets of the ...
03.08.2020 Iceberg Alley There’s an old saying that if life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Some folks in northeastern Canada are following that advice -- with a twist. When life gives them icebergs, they’re making vodka -- and selling excursions to the bergs ...
03.01.2020 A New friend Biologists have been sampling life in the Gulf of Mexico for decades. Yet they're a long way from getting acquainted with everything that lives there. Consider a tiny shark that was discovered there a decade ago. When researchers pulled it ...
02.23.2020 Empire Builder A massive tsunami in northwestern Sumatra wiped out coastal villages for miles. Only one survived. But by a century later, its influence began to wane -- the result of a new power settling on the sites of the destroyed villages. ...
02.16.2020 Night School For the flashlight fish, school doesn't end at night. In fact, the schooling is just getting started. The fish is one of the few known to congregate in schools at night, even when there's no moonlight. That's because the flashlight ...
02.09.2020 Damaged Seagrass When Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in 2017, it killed almost 70 people and inflicted more than a hundred billion dollars’ worth of damage. Not all of the damage was visible, though. Some of it was on the bottom of the ...
02.02.2020 Long Waves With a top speed of a few hundred feet per hour, the giant tortoise won’t win many races. Compared to some of the longest waves in the oceans, though, it’s like an Indy race car. The waves are almost entirely ...
01.26.2020 Double Trouble Earth's changing climate is expected to produce higher temperatures and stronger tropical storms. And when you put those two together, the results could be especially deadly. A team of scientists recently studied the risks of extreme heat -- defined as ...
01.19.2020 Kelp Oil For more than three months, giant kelp off the coast of California bobbed up and down like a pumpjack in an oil field. The goal of that motion was to replace a few pumpjacks by developing a replacement for some ...
01.12.2020 Deep Edge The Pacific coast of South America is a bit like a medieval castle surrounded by a moat. The “castle” is the Andes Mountains, which hug the coast. And the “moat” is the Peru-Chile Trench -- a gash in the ocean ...
01.05.2020 Cave Markers The Mediterranean Sea has been recording sea level for millions of years in a cave on a Spanish island. As the water rises and falls, it adds layers of minerals to rock formations inside the cave. And interpreting those layers ...
12.29.2019 Glass Houses There are many symbols of love, from the heart to red roses. And for some couples in Japan, it’s a glass vase -- the skeleton of a sponge. Venus’s flower basket is a type of glass sponge. Various species of ...
12.22.2019 Trade Winds Today, the word “trade” means to swap something. That hasn’t always been the case, though. Centuries ago, it meant a path or a track. The new definition blew in on the wind -- the trade wind. Trade winds blow in ...
12.15.2019 Resting Eggs From November through April, a tiny marine creature is pretty common in the coastal waters of the northern Gulf of Mexico. It’s a species of copepod. It looks like a cross between a flea and a shrimp, but it’s only ...
12.08.2019 Wobbegong When you walk on a tattered carpet or a stained-up rug, you don’t usually worry about it lunging up and biting you. Unless, that is, you happen to be walking through shallow coastal waters around Indonesia or parts of Australia. ...
12.01.2019 Hurricane Gliders Hanging out in the water while a hurricane is bearing down sounds a little scary. But that’s just what some underwater “gliders” are doing. They’re recording ocean conditions before, during, and after hurricanes pass overhead. That’s helping scientists improve their ...
11.24.2019 'Nervy' Squid The squid has quite a nerve. In fact, it has the biggest nerve fiber in the animal kingdom -- a thousand times wider than the typical human fiber. That’s made the squid a good subject for learning about how nerves ...
11.17.2019 Cayman Trench The Caribbean Sea is known for its tourist-attracting wonders: sandy beaches, coral reefs, and beautiful blue-green waters. But the deepest part of the sea is full of geological wonders. Parts of Earth’s crust there are moving apart. That’s created a ...
11.10.2019 Big Jaws If you really want to see “jaws,” forget about great white sharks. Instead, look for the sarcastic fringehead. It’s a little fish -- no more than a foot long. But the male fringehead can spread his jaws wider than the ...
11.03.2019 Icebound Most of the time, an icebreaker that doesn’t plow through the ice is about as useful as a car without wheels. But a German icebreaker is scheduled to make an important scientific expedition -- while frozen inside the ice. The ...
10.27.2019 Expensive Jewelry Black corals are different from most coral species. Most coral “skeletons,” for example, are made of calcium carbonate -- the mineral that makes up chalk. The skeleton of a black coral, though, is made of proteins and chitin -- the ...
10.20.2019 Bengal Fan The Himalayan mountains climb miles high, forming a towering fence line across Asia. But they also plunge miles deep -- buried at the bottom of the Bay of Bengal, off the eastern coast of India. The underwater portion of the ...
10.13.2019 Little Stinger The lesser weever typically is no more than about five or six inches long. Even so, you don’t want to mess with it. It can give you a painful sting that can smart for hours. You’ll come across this little ...
10.06.2019 Gulf of Maine For a lobster, hotter water is a bad thing. So not surprisingly, biologists expect the crustaceans to hop out of a rapidly warming pot of water off the east coast of the United States and Canada. The Gulf of Maine ...
09.29.2019 Red-Lipped Batfish If a modern-day Hollywood creature designer worked with a 1940s make-up artist, they might come up with something that’s shaped a little like a bat, walks on the ocean floor, and has gaudy red lips. In other words, they’d make ...
09.22.2019 Counting Sharks When many people see a dark shadow passing through the water close to shore, they think of one thing: Jaws. Is it a shark, ready to attack unsuspecting swimmers and surfers? On the beaches of eastern Australia, it’s probably not. ...
09.15.2019 Standing Tall Mangrove forests are some of the most important on the planet. They protect the coastline from storms and provide habitat for fish and other creatures. They also sponge up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which helps slow down changes to ...
09.08.2019 Seeing Blue Some of the most amazing colors on Earth are seen in icebergs and their parent bodies, glaciers. The intense shades of blue and blue-green make them look like icy confections -- like sno-cones flavored with blueberry or mint syrup. These ...
09.01.2019 Guitarfish The guitarfish looks a bit like the result of an experiment by a junior mad scientist. The front half is wide and flat, like a sting ray. But the back half is long and tapered, like a shark. Put the ...
08.25.2019 Adapting to Change Tropical cyclones are a fact of life on the islands of southeast Asia. Among other things, they can damage reef systems that attract divers and other tourists, harming local economies. How people and institutions handle that challenge can determine how ...
08.18.2019 Cooperation The pistol shrimp has terrible eyesight. But some species of the shrimp get help -- not spectacles, but a companion fish: a goby. It keeps an eye out for predators. In turn, the shrimp maintains a burrow that’s used by ...
08.11.2019 Bodega Bay Bodega Bay is best known for its birds. Not real birds, but the scary ones from a movie: Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.” The film was set and shot in the village of Bodega Bay, California, up the coast from San ...
08.04.2019 Smart Fish? We might not always think so, but people who spend time preening in a mirror are actually passing an intelligence test -- showing an awareness that the thing in the mirror is them. Only a few other species have shown ...
07.28.2019 Sneaky Waves A calm day on the beaches of the Pacific Northwest can turn deadly in a hurry. A single large wave can rush ashore, running inland up to 50 yards farther than the previous waves. Anyone who’s too close can be ...
07.21.2019 Odd Whale An ancestor of modern-day whales may have paddled across the Atlantic Ocean like an otter. And when it reached the Americas, it could have walked out on its back legs. Scientists discovered the fossilized skeleton of this odd creature in ...
07.14.2019 Tumbleweeds Like its garden-variety namesake, the sea cucumber doesn’t get around much. Most species appear to spend their entire adult lives on the same patch of sea floor. But recent research suggests that at least some of them may get out ...
07.07.2019 Hungry for Seafood We Americans love our shrimp, salmon, and canned tuna -- we eat more of those than any other type of seafood. Overall, in 2017 we consumed about 16 pounds of fish and shellfish per person -- just below the all-time ...
06.30.2019 Fish Problems Fishing just isn’t what it used to be -- commercial fishing, that is. For much of the last century, the world’s fleets brought in more fish and shellfish every decade. Since about 1990, though, the catch has remained about the ...
06.23.2019 Loud Toadfish It’s probably not surprising that a critter known as a toadfish can be a bit rude. A couple of studies in recent years have found that male toadfish “grunt” when their neighbors are trying to court females. That makes a ...
06.16.2019 Cold Invaders A few strands of kelp washing up on a beach usually isn’t much cause for alarm. But when two clumps of southern bull kelp were found in Antarctica in early 2017, scientists were concerned. While the kelp didn’t constitute a ...
06.09.2019 Steelhead Trout What do you get if you give a young rainbow trout a good travel agent? A steelhead trout. While most rainbow trout spend their entire lives in rivers and streams, some head out to sea. Such travelers are known as ...
06.02.2019 Changing Colors If you like the deep blues and rich blue-greens of the oceans, then you might really enjoy the view at the end of the century. A recent study says the blues could be bluer and the greens greener. While that ...
05.26.2019 Grunt Sculpin The grunt sculpin doesn’t do much of anything the conventional way. The little fish usually walks instead of swims. It frequently lives in “homes” that were abandoned by other creatures. And when it comes to courting and raising a family, ...
05.19.2019 Sigsbee Basin In the history of the United States, Dwight Sigsbee is recorded as the captain of the U.S.S. Maine when the ship was sunk in Havana Harbor in 1898. The sinking triggered the Spanish-American War. In the history of oceanography, though, ...
05.12.2019 Rhinobird The rhinoceros auklet has a strong work ethic. The bird heads out to sea before dawn, spends the day hunting, and returns to its nest well after dark. Since predators can’t see the birds coming and going as well when ...
05.05.2019 El Nino Modoki Climate scientists in Asia noticed something odd about the summer of 2004. Droughts and heat waves overwhelmed a good bit of southeast Asia, most of Australia, and parts of the Americas. But it was especially wet in the Philippines, New ...
04.28.2019 Watery Snacks Jellyfish are among the least-appetizing creatures in the oceans. And biologists have long assumed that even other sea creatures didn’t eat them. After all, 95 percent of the average jellyfish is nothing but water, so it doesn’t offer much actual ...
04.21.2019 Ocean Explorer A research vessel will be making some nice stops this year -- from South Carolina to Bermuda to the Azores. Between those ports of call, it’ll explore regions of the Atlantic Ocean that are largely uncharted. It’ll map the ocean ...

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