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.

A major new digital mapping project could help safeguard some of the world's most important and well-known heritage sites from rising seas, flooding and coastal erosion.

Researchers have created the Global Coastal Heritage (Glo-CoH) dataset, the first comprehensive digital map of UNESCO World Heritage sites located along coastlines that are less than 20 metres above sea level.

An international research team led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen and the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW) investigated how the shape of black corals influences the functions of their cilia. By combining an unusually comprehensive suite of imaging and microsensor techniques, the researchers were able to visualize both, water flow and oxygen transport, from individual cilia to entire coral fragments. They found that the cilia allow corals to create and direct the flow of water around and within them, thus optimising oxygen supply, feeding and internal transport. The study was recently published in Communications Biology.

Researchers developed a diffusion-based artificial intelligence system that learns ship navigation directly from real-world voyage data rather than relying on optimization algorithms. Trained on a vessel in Japan's busy and geographically complex Seto Inland Sea, the AI learned to balance multiple objectives simultaneously, including collision avoidance, efficient routing, and speed control. The AI also learned local navigation practices, such as staying within designated traffic lanes, without being explicitly programmed to do so. The study demonstrates that diffusion-based AI can capture human-like navigation behavior from real-world data, offering a promising new approach to autonomous ship navigation in complex maritime environments.