Illuminated sugars show how microbes eat the ocean's carbon
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 11-Jul-2025 02:10 ET (11-Jul-2025 06:10 GMT/UTC)
Sugars are essential for life in the ocean, but some resist breakdown even by the hungriest marine microbes. Now, scientists have developed a new tool that allows them to observe, in real time, how microbial communities feed on complex carbohydrates such as sugars. This approach can help us understand how marine microbes are involved in the global carbon cycle.
More than a thousand fish species use sounds to exchange information, attract mates, and avoid predators through hums, grunts, clicks, and bubbles. Yet, the vital role of fish sounds—and the impact of noise pollution on the fishes that produce them—are left out of critical conservation policy, says study led by marine ecologists at Simon Fraser University.
The ocean is filled with the bustling sounds of daily marine life, including the sounds made by soniferous fish species. These sounds aren’t merely passive sounds—soniferous fishes produce sound themselves, like a whale ‘singing’ through vocalizations, says Kieran Cox, Liber Ero and NSERC fellow at SFU and co-founder of FishSounds.net.
Plastic particles less than one micrometre in size are found across the globe – from the peaks of the Alps to the depths of the oceans. A research team from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), Utrecht University, and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) investigated the presence of nanoplastic in the North Atlantic. The findings show that nanosized plastic particles are present at all depths between the temperate and subtropical zone of the ocean. By mass, the amount of nanoplastic is comparable to that of microplastic. An article published in Nature concludes that nanoplastic plays a far greater role in marine plastic pollution than previously assumed.
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