While there are only four official seasons in the year, anglers in the Northeast recognize a fifth: striper season, the months from May to November when striped bass, which can grow up to 100 pounds and are renowned for their fight once hooked, migrate along the coastal waters between the Chesapeake and Canadian Maritimes within range of thousands of fishing lures. But the fishery, which generated approximately $13 billion in economic activity along the Eastern seaboard in 2016, is crashing, despite the fact that the vast majority of bass caught by recreational anglers are released back into the ocean.

A completely new order of marine sponges has been found by researchers at the Museum of Evolution, Uppsala University. The sponge order, named Vilesida, produces substances that could be used in drug development. The same substances support the hypothesis that sponges – and therefore animals – emerged 100 million years earlier than previously thought. 

Two new publications remap the understanding of reverse weathering in the scientific community. The Dauphin Island Sea Lab’s Senior Marine Scientist, Dr. Jeffrey Krause, played a key role in both projects, which include several collaborating institutions. 

A new study published in Scientific Reports reports the discovery of a remarkably extensive hydrothermal vent field on the shelf of Milos Island, Greece. The vents were identified during the METEOR expedition M192, where the research team used a combination of different methods, including underwater technologies such as an autonomous and a remotely operated vehicles, to survey the seafloor. These approaches revealed previously undocumented venting between 100 and 230 meters depth. This makes Milos home to one of the largest known shallow-to-intermediate hydrothermal systems in the Mediterranean and substantially expands current knowledge of vent distribution in the region.

A new study, led by the University of Vienna and the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, shows how the eyes of adult marine bristleworms continue to grow throughout life – driven by a ring of neural stem cells reminiscent of vertebrate eyes. What's more, these stem cells respond to environmental light. The research, published in Nature Communications, offers new insight into the fundamental principles of eye evolution and the role of light in shaping the adult nervous system – even in organisms often considered rather simple.

01 December 2025 / Kiel. A study by an international team involving the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel shows that the expansion of Antarctic Bottom Water during a major warming phase around 12,000 years ago displaced a carbon-rich mass of deep-water in the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean. This process released carbon dioxide that had been stored in the deep ocean, thereby contributing to the end of the last Ice Age. The study provides important insights into how the ocean may respond as Antarctica continues to warm today. The findings are published today in Nature Geoscience.

Humpback whales are less picky eaters than other baleen whales. If cod runs out in an area, they may switch to krill. This flexibility might be a key reason for their evolutionary success, according to whale scientists in a recent study.

The study showed that surgeonfish use various combinations of feeding movements and that each species uses a particular pattern more often — the pattern matching one of the three types of bites. By extracting teeth from these species for examination, the researchers were able to reconstruct the evolutionary history of bite mode across surgeonfish.