Marine Ecology

Sea star wasting disease has devastated intertidal populations of these animals on the West coast from Mexico to Alaska. But what about sea stars that live below the low tide line, mostly out of sight? An analysis of data collected by divers in the Salish Sea shows severe impacts on some species, especially the sunflower sea star, Pycnopodia helianthoides.

The oceanic crab Planes minutus lives far from land. The crabs find a refuge between the upper shell and tail of loggerhead sea turtles, where they are nearly always found as a monogamous pair, one male and one female. But floating plastic trash in the ocean provides many new places for these crabs to live — and more space opens up many different ways for crabs to live and find partners.

A new robot is designed to mimic the behavior of teeny tiny larvae.

Read more in Hakai Magazine

The five robots plopped into Bodega Bay were designed to mimic the larvae that float around in the ocean, but it was hard to imagine these canisters — which looked a bit like Minions from the computer-animated film — mingling with microscopic marine critters, let alone copying their movements.

Read more in the San Francisco Chronicle

‘Minion’-like Robots Reveal Surprising Ways Marine Larvae Move, and What That Means for the Ocean

For UC Davis News by Kat Kerlin

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