Invasive rats on tropical islands are creating winners and losers among the tiny underwater animals near the bottom of the food chain that inhabit surrounding coral reefs.

Researchers at Lancaster University and the University of Texas say the changes to these marine ecosystems can rewire food chains on the reefs.

Results show that the main mode of seabird nutrients moving up food webs is through fish, which feed both specialised fish-eating predators and more generalised carnivores. As such, when seabird nutrients are added or taken away from ecosystems, there is a rewiring of how energy travels up food webs, and a reconfiguration of larger fish communities.

Wild seabirds that face high energy demands during the breeding season go on to migrate farther and raise more chicks the next year, but at a cost to their own survival. An international team, led by researchers from Nagoya University, raised the energy cost of flight for some birds and tracked them through the next year of their annual cycle. The researchers introduce a concept called "energetic flexibility" and offer rare experimental evidence for how the costs of one season carry over to shape the next. The study appears in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Researchers at Reichman University have developed an innovative biological method for protecting marine infrastructure from corrosion caused by prolonged exposure to seawater. The study, published in the prestigious scientific journal Cell Reports Physical Science, presents an environmentally friendly alternative to the chemical corrosion inhibitors currently used to protect metals — materials that can be both polluting and costly.

The Office of Naval Research has released its new Science and Technology Strategy, which serves as a roadmap for the future to meet complex challenges facing the Department of the Navy and broader Department of War.

New research from the University of St Andrews and Université de Neuchâtel, has uncovered the mechanism which allows sperm whales to sleep in a unique vertical position, just under the ocean surface.

Existing computer models used to guide decisions about energy infrastructure and contamination often treat microbes as fixed and unchanging, even though they constantly adapt to their surroundings. University of Maine researchers are aiming to close the gap by analyzing microbial genetic information using artificial intelligence to identify the biological processes that most strongly influence underground chemical reactions. Those insights will then be integrated into existing subsurface models, allowing scientists to better simulate how microbes, minerals and groundwater interact in changing environments.

An international study led by researchers from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) reveals that Indigenous, African and Afro-descendant communities relied more heavily on marine resources, while communities of immigrants from Germany consumed mainly plant species and terrestrial products.

A sunfish being blown to bits is the result of a never before described behavior of an orca pod in the Gulf of California. Researchers observed two separate events in which one orca held a sunfish carcass by the fin and another torpedoed toward it, blowing it into smithereens. The behavior could be a way to portion off more manageable pieces of food for calves present during the interaction, but it’s also possible that it serves an entirely different function: fun. The team said more observations of such events involving sunfish are needed to determine the exact ecological and evolutionary significance of the strategies in orca populations.

We can now measure changes in the thousands of different and invisible microbes that contribute to healthy reef communities.

In 2012, Nature revealed that humans provide a home to thousands of different species of microbes, in a series of papers that opened a path to understanding the impact of the human microbiome on our health.

Today, a paper in Nature documents over 800,000 microbial genomes, identifying over 500 new bacterial species and over 300,000 distinct viruses in the waters of the Great Barrier Reef.

This invisible community was documented using DNA found in samples of seawater from 48 reefs, by a research team led by The University of Queensland and the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS).

The authors believe this is the first time that the microbiome of the open waters of reef systems on the Great Barrier Reef has been comprehensively surveyed. They have created the Great Barrier Reef Microbial Genomes Database which is available to all reef researchers.

“Now, we can start to explore what makes a healthy reef microbiome, and how these invisible communities respond to changes on the Great Barrier Reef such as bleaching, storms, sediment, fishing and other stresses,” Professor Philip Hugenholtz, a microbiologist at the University of Queensland and a senior author on the paper said.

Researchers from James Cook University, University of Melbourne and University of Tasmania also contributed to the study.