In the early summer months, undergraduate Emily Meyers would rise before the sun, sometimes around 3 or 4 a.m. Keeping time by the ocean tides, she’d cart her research materials to eelgrass beds near the Bodega Marine Laboratory.
Outside Eric Sanford’s office window, foamy waters crash against rocky shores and open up to the expansive blue of the Pacific Ocean. Here, at the Bodega Marine Laboratory, Sanford and colleagues in his lab work to understand how ocean acidification is changing the ecology and evolution of the planet’s marine life.
Covering themselves in everything from algae to urchins, crabs know how to accessorize for safety. Sponge crabs use their back pair of legs “to hold an intact sponge over their body,” says Jay Stachowicz.
Meadow spittlebugs, once very abundant on plants along the California coastline, are declining rapidly or vanishing from their previous habitats, according to ecologists Richard Karban and Mikaela Huntzinger of UC Davis, co-authors of newly published research in the journal Ecology.
Researchers measured the physical traits and defenses of 351 butterfly fish species compared to feeding style. The fish fell into two broad groups: hunters and grazers. Hunters, with deeper bodies and bigger spines, left the reefs; grazers remained in the relative safety of the reefs.
Seagrass meadows could play a limited, localized role in alleviating ocean acidification in coastal ecosystems, according to new work led by Carnegie’s David Koweek and including Carnegie’s Ken Caldeira and published in Ecological Applications.