Few studies have investigated coastal marine plankton and aggregate abundance and diversity with high frequency over a long time period. Here, a group of researchers deployed a cabled marine Oshima Coastal Environmental data Acquisition Network System (OCEANS) observatory in 20 m of water off the coast of Oshima Island in Japan to establish plankton diversity and plankton and aggregate abundance as a function of ocean turbulence during two 4-month periods spanning 2014 to 2016.

The climate crisis seems to be altering gray whales’ access to food, leading them to change their migration paths and forage in San Francisco Bay — a busy shipping area with a narrow bottleneck both whales and boats must cross. Scientists surveying these whales suspect that many don’t survive to leave the bay: of the 114 individuals they identified, only four were seen in more than one year between 2018 and 2025, and 21 were found dead, giving a minimum mortality rate of 18%. Many deaths were caused by vessel strike injuries, while some others are due to starvation. 

The real climate risks to Ireland from changes to the Atlantic currents that sustain our mild climate are obscured by exaggerated claims in media headlines and movies.

That’s according to Dr Gerard McCarthy, a Maynooth University (MU) oceanographer at the Irish Climate Analysis and Research UnitS (ICARUS) in the Department of Geography, who has led a new article for Nature Climate Change.

The latest paper is a retrospective on a landmark 2015 study led by Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, which identified long-term Atlantic cooling as a sign that the Atlantic Meridional Circulation (AMOC) was weakening.

In a paper published in SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences, a research team systematically interpreted the key scientific issues such as the DO threshold, structural characteristics, distribution patterns, formation and maintenance mechanisms, and driving factors of the OMZ in the context of global change. It may provide important scientific basis for further exploring the coupling relationship between global change and oceanic OMZ, and for understanding marine hypoxia and deoxygenation issues from a global perspective

During warm summer nights when the full moon rises, some species of polychaetes swim up from the seafloor to spawn. It’s a perilous journey, because hungry jellyfish are waiting in the water column. This has now been documented for the first time.

When the option is to adapt or starve, animals are no stranger to getting scrappy in the face of climate change. Researchers conducted fieldwork in East Antarctica, where they revealed an underdocumented link in the food web of the Southern Ocean: Adélie penguins and their shelled pteropod consumption. Shelled pteropods, specifically Thecosomata, are a suborder of free-swimming sea snails. The study aimed to better understand Adélie penguin foraging behaviour and, in doing so, provided the first clear video evidence of Adélie penguins actively feeding upon shelled pteropods during their foraging sessions.

Mercury released into the oceans affects marine environments worldwide. Traditionally, its distribution and quantity have been estimated using marine biogeochemical simulation models. A recent international study led by Japanese researchers analyzed blood mercury concentrations in more than 11,215 seabirds from 108 species, of which 659 newly collected samples and over 10,556 from previous studies. This is the first biologically based estimate of oceanic mercury distribution.

As climate change intensifies harmful algal blooms worldwide, an international team led by Hiroshima University has developed a hybrid modeling approach that combines algal movement simulations, AI, and long-term monitoring data to sharpen forecasts of these bloom events—linked to environmental damage, mass fish die-offs, economic losses, and risks to human health.